The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ listed as ex-FBI men in the membership directory of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.

      The business editor of the Miami Herald, in commenting on the phenomenal national growth of this local firm, mentioned that its FBI leadership gives it an advantage in signing up new industrial clients. He said Wackenhut has this special advantage in negotiating with industrial security officers “because a high percentage of industrial security officers were once with the FBI”!

       5. The Electronic Eyes, Ears, and Memories

      In the novel George Orwell wrote about the year 1984 he envisioned that the advances of electronics had enabled his fictional totalitarian leader to install a telescreen in each living space of the realm. In this way the tyrant could maintain virtually total visual and audio surveillance when he chose. As Orwell put it: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

      If Mr. Orwell were writing his book today rather than in the 1940s his details would surely be more horrifying. Today there are cameras that can indeed see in the dark. There are banks of giant memory machines that conceivably could recall in a few seconds every pertinent action—including failures, embarrassments, or possibly incriminating acts—from the lifetime of each citizen. And brain research has progressed to the point where it is all too readily believable that a Big Brother could implant an electrode in the brain of each baby at birth and thereafter maintain by remote control a certain degree of restraint over the individual’s moods and behavior, at least until his personality had suitably jelled.

      Fortunately for the human race, a good many people are becoming apprehensive about the wonders bestowed by electronic research. Fortunately also the expense of most of the devices prohibits their use against whole populations (though the prices are coming down), so the present uses are mostly selective. Nevertheless in the course of a year literally millions of Americans are watched or overheard electronically without their awareness at some time during any single week.

      Let us pause for a moment to brief ourselves on the state of the “art” of electronic surveillance as of 1964. In subsequent chapters we shall see how the devices that have been developed are applied in many situations in ways that tend to annihilate the privacy and dignity of the citizens under scrutiny.

      Each year several thousand TV cameras are sold to industry, and such giants as General Precision, General Electric, and RCA are among the companies selling them. Seattle’s classified phone directory lists fourteen local companies offering to sell or install closed-circuit TV. Many of the TV cameras used in industry are for such prosaic purposes as watching instrument panels or furnace operations; others are for watching people.

      In some instances the people involved know about the people-watching, as at the gates of an IBM plant doing research work in Endicott, New York. In others it is done secretly.

      Mr. Max Kanter—president of ITV in New York, which rents or sells closed-circuit installations—explained that if you wish to conceal the cameras even the lens need not show. He said: “If there is screening material or mesh to conceal the camera, and if it is focused at some point beyond, the lens can look right through the screening material.” (His charge for renting basic equipment for one week: about $200.)

      The makers of TV cameras for surveillance have not only learned to miniaturize them to a thickness of only about four inches, but they have learned that by shooting into a mirror they can install the cameras vertically in a wall that has a four-inch air space. The fact that the FBI uses closed-circuit TV in some of its surveillance work came out in the trial of a Navy yeoman suspected of spying.

      Hidden still cameras are also in wide use for recording the activities of people. A company called Cameras for Industry has been aggressive in selling plants, stores, banks, etc., on “Automatic Photo Systems” that can now be rented for “pennies a day.” The cameras operate silently, can take thousands of pictures in a single loading, and, it is explained, they can either be used openly or be concealed. The camera can be triggered by a photoelectric eye. Or if a clerk is handing you a document he can first insert it in a number-stamping machine, and the act of stamping will trigger a hidden camera beamed at you.

      Then there are the tiny cameras used by investigators or others seeking evidence. Some are built into cigarette lighters. As the owner lights his cigarette, his thumb action simultaneously triggers the camera.

      The impetus for the development of many of these remarkable surveillance devices came from defense and space research and from efforts to keep up with the Russians in this area. Advances in infrared photography (in the dark) resulted largely from research for aerial reconnaissance, as did automatic tripping devices for cameras. Many early developments in closed-circuit TV were for use in surveillance of machines and dials as well as people at missile launching complexes. Transistors made possible miniature transmitters for use in satellites where every ounce counts.

      And then there was the evidence of remarkable Russian techniques that inspired the U.S. Government to plunge into research and development contracts in the fields of surveillance and counterintrusion. The discovery of that tiny microphone imbedded in the Great Seal of the United States that hung behind the U.S. ambassador’s desk in the Moscow embassy was more of a shock to our technicians than has ever been admitted. A man intimately familiar with the search for this microphone confided: “It was an advancement of the art by the Russians that we were not then up to. We were not equipped to spot it because they had placed across the street an enormous transmitter beamed to bounce signals off the buried cavity device, and that giant transmitter was operating in an ultra-high-frequency spectrum we were not equipped to detect.” The British embassy inspired the Americans to tear the ambassador’s office apart, literally, because our British cousins confided that they had detected at their own embassy a signal they couldn’t identify.

      More than one hundred hidden listening devices have in recent years been found in U.S. embassies and residences in Soviet-bloc countries. A picturesque example of Soviet advances in miniaturization was discovered accidentally by a U.S. military attache at a Moscow bar when he picked up a martini not intended for him. The “olive” in it, according to a Time account, contained a transmitter, and the tiny toothpick stuck in it was an antenna.

      One step the U.S. Government is now taking to protect secret discussions in its embassies in questionable countries is to ship portable rooms to the embassies. Such a room is sent as a knockdown package and assembled inside the embassy. It is shielded on all sides to prevent transmission of sound and is so built as to permit visual inspection under, over, and all around the “room” for any wires.

      U.S. companies now can make microphones and transmitters just about as small as anyone could conceivably desire. Transmitters now available can fit inside a lipstick tube or ball-point pen or appear to be a lump of sugar. Microphones smaller than a twenty-five-cent piece are being made and widely used.

      At least thirty U.S. companies are now involved in manufacturing electronic eavesdropping equipment. One of the larger companies, Solar Research, Inc., in Oakland Park, Florida, claims that in 1962, for example, its sales increased fourfold within a year. Some sell only to law-enforcement agencies; others sell only surveillance equipment to law-enforcement agencies but sell counterintrusion devices to private concerns; and some seem interested in selling anything they have to anyone who has the money to pay for the devices. There is no law against manufacturing or selling bugging devices, and pitifully few laws, FCC regulations, or court decisions against their use. I had no difficulty, for example, in obtaining catalogues from several companies. And I saw on display in the window of an electronics shop on Forty-third Street in New York City a device that automatically starts a tape recorder when a telephone conversation comes onto a line.

      When one West Coast manufacturer СКАЧАТЬ