1980 SPECIAL REPORT :" THE INVESTIGATORS"

There is something categorically different about electronic surveillance in our contemporary moment: the extent to which it operates on a mass scale. Wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping was highly individualized up until the 1980s. We were tapping individual telephones and listening to individual conversations. Now, as a result of the rise of “dataveillence” in particular, we’re talking about a scale of surveillance that scarcely seems fathomable from the perspective of the 1960s, 1970s, or even the 1980s.

Dataveillance is the tracking of metadata. The NSA does listen to people’s conversations, which is what we traditionally think “wiretapping” is, but far more often the NSA tracks the data of those conversations. What’s important isn’t necessarily what you said on the phone but who you called, when you called, where your phone is, the metadata of your financial transactions—that sort of stuff. They triangulate a million different data points and they can come to a very clear understanding of what has happened.

But one of the areas in which there is a continuity from even the earliest days of wiretapping, is the extent to which telecommunications industries are complicit in the rise of a surveillance state and the extent to which surveillance data flows between the telecommunication infrastructure and the infrastructure of American law enforcement. The easiest way for law enforcement to tap wires in the 1920s in the service of the war on alcohol wasn’t to actually go and physically tap a wire but to listen in through the Bell System central exchange. Bell publicly resisted complicity in that arrangement, but that’s what happened. It’s the same today.

Yet people are willing to let companies eavesdrop on them.

Those smart speakers? They are essentially wiretaps. They are constantly listening. It’s a new type of corporate surveillance: If they listen to you, they can get you what you want, when you want. People like that. But where else will that data go?

What will happen next?

Historians are not in the business of prognostication, but the one thing that I can say with some certainty is that electronic surveillance and dataveillance are going to scale. They will be more global and more instantaneous. I can say with much more certainty that that public attention to these issues will wax and wane. This is one of the things that is so striking about the history of wiretapping in the United States: It has never been a secret, but it’s only every 10 to 15 years that there is a major public scandal surrounding it. There are these brief moments of outrage and then there are these long moments of complacency, like now, and that is one thing that has enabled surveillance to persist in the way that it does.

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