The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ companies are so anxious not to lose their contacts with the Pentagon that, to be on the safe side, they allow their security officers to push defense-type precautions into other areas of the company. In such instances little distinction in hiring and surveillance policy is made between employees working on defense contracts and those in the commercial, non-military phases of their company’s operations. The industrial security chief for Temco Electronics was quoted in 1962 as stating: “Regardless of where a man is going to work, his background should be looked at as carefully as if he were going to work on classified material.”

      The fact that the United States has been involved in four hot wars during this century and in a prolonged cold war for most of the last two decades is responsible for the continual introduction of new surveillance techniques and social controls. What is disturbing, however, is that the government rarely relinquishes such wartime techniques and controls when the shooting ends.

      In the national emergency of 1941 President Roosevelt, as Commander-in-Chief, quietly authorized his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to resort to wiretapping in urgent cases involving the nation’s security. This action was taken in the face of what seemed to be a flat prohibition against wiretapping for any reason. In 1934 Congress had voted such a prohibition when it enacted the now notorious Section 605 of the Communications Act.

      Mr. Jackson found that one phrase, by straining, could be rationalized into an authorization to tap. That phrase said it was a crime to “intercept” and “divulge” messages. Mr. Jackson decided that for the emergency this could be stretched to mean that it was all right to intercept as long as you did not divulge. He chose to ignore a nearby phrase banning the “use” of any intercepted message.

      The war emergency ended; but all of the U.S. Attorneys General since Mr. Jackson, including the incumbent one, have embraced his interpretation to justify wiretapping, when it seemed to be warranted, for “leads” only. And many local law-enforcement officials have echoed the Attorneys General. The interpretation has been mouthed so many times that people assume it is the “law.”

      Another hangover of wartime measures is the use of recording devices attached to telephones to monitor calls you make or receive. Before World War II there was occasional use of such devices at the War Department, with the switchboard operators scrupulously notifying the party on the other end of the line that the call would be recorded. As the war emergency approached, the demand for recordings became so urgent that the Signal Corps installed a great many of the devices and notice to the calling party was discontinued! By 1945 more than 2000 of them were in operation. An FCC report in 1947 related that “The wartime experience gained with telephone recording devices has resulted in an unprecedented commercial demand since V-J day.” By 1947 there were 19,000 recorders in use in the U.S., three quarters of them by business organizations, with no legal requirement that the other party be notified. Meanwhile in Washington the use of monitoring continued to grow.

      Consider a final example. Few people realize it, but a sedition statute that goes back to World War I and is still in effect declares it a crime willfully to make false statements about the U.S. armed forces that could interfere with their success or to make any kind of statements intended to discourage enlistments. This statute was revived in 1953 while the nation was in a state of emergency, while winding up the Korean War, and today the government refuses to declare the emergency ended. Perhaps it never will. Technically the Southerners who criticized use of federal troops during crises involving civil rights for Negroes could have been prosecuted for sedition since such statements conceivably might discourage enlistments in some areas. Similarly those Republicans who suggested that the Russians had not pulled their missiles out of Cuba could be prosecuted since this was contrary to official statements. No Attorney General in recent decades has chosen to enforce this statute in peacetime. But a would-be dictator could have a fine time using it to hound critics.

      An even greater legacy of suspicion and surveillance has followed in the wake of the prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union. The devious tactics of Communists provided very real grounds for acting vigorously to counteract them. But it is also unfortunately true that a good many people have focused all their anxieties and hostilities into a generalized fear of Communism, and that this fear has been exploited in many cases by members of the radical right to harass anyone with whom they seriously disagreed. Freedom to communicate thoughts and express unorthodox ideas has thus often, even in private discussions, been inhibited in many areas in recent years.

       3. The Pressures Generated by Abundance

      It may seem odd that affluence should undermine privacy, but it clearly has. There is evidence that much of the great increase in surveillance, investigation, and intrusion into people’s privacy can be traced to conditions arising from abundance.

      Consider the problem of launching and moving goods in today’s superabundant economy. Styles in products are changing swiftly. The lifetime of product types is becoming ever shorter. And, there is increasing strain to find significantly new products or variants. All these factors have produced a greater preoccupation with secrecy. A company concerned with secrecy in industry begins to wonder who can be trusted and brings in the undercover agents to check on employees.

      This pressure to move goods affects individual privacy in another way. Companies have been turning to more relentless selling tactics to attract our attention. Privacy diminishes as the hawkers telephone us several times a week, or shove their feet in the door while posing as survey makers.

      Affluence has produced a tremendous increase in the use of credit and in the sale of all sorts of insurance policies. The sellers of both credit and insurance feel that to survive they must investigate the lives of prospects. Every insurance policy, for example, is a risk, a bet. The companies try to hedge their bets on policies of substance by arranging for a quiet investigation of the insured’s finances and living habits. And so we have millions of insurance investigations, often accompanied by a “neighborhood check”—and the findings often reach files from which information is swapped or sold.

      The growth in the amount of spare time that most Americans can enjoy has in at least one way made privacy more difficult to achieve for many of them. Americans have more time now to read newspapers, magazines, and books and to watch TV and listen to radio. They want not only to be informed but to be entertained and, often, titillated. Many enjoy gossip and scandalous facts about fellow citizens. And many of the mass media have relentlessly sought to provide them with a steady diet of gossipy information. The result of both the desire for such information and the media’s efforts to supply it has in effect produced a combined assault on privacy. The dual nature of this assault is pointed up by Morris Ernst and Alan Schwartz in their definitive legal analysis of privacy as it is affected by the media.¹ At one point they note that the desire “of the mass media to make a profit at the expense of our privacy is a growing pressure.” And they ask: “How should the ever-increasing thirst of the public for news and information be balanced against the sometimes desperate desire for privacy on the part of the individual?”

      Finally we might simply note sociologist Kingsley Davis’ observation that the explosive growth of both possessions and people “is causing an ever larger portion of our high level of living to be used to escape from the consequences of congestion.”

       4. The Growth of Investigation as a Private Industry

      There are now not only thousands of firms offering their services as investigators but also a large number of management-consultant firms that derive most of their income from screening, assessing, or observing employees. And there are quite a few hundred psychologists who are happy to reap the bounty paid for screening, probing, and assessing managerial aspirants. Finally, a great many firms are eager to keep a steady stream of subjects harnessed to their lie detector machines. An official of one of the nation’s larger investigative agencies told me with a grin: “A lot of money can be made with lie detectors.”

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