The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ and espionage operatives. Federal investigators, however, represent only a small fraction of the total number of people in the nation who earn their living investigating other people. There are hundreds of thousands of private, corporate, municipal, county, and state investigators.

      Consider one private investigative firm that is little known to most Americans. Its world headquarters are in Atlanta. This firm bears the now outdated name of the Retail Credit Company. It offers a continent-spanning intelligence service with 6000 full-time salaried “inspectors” on “constant call,” who operate out of 1500 offices in every state and Canadian province. It has sixty-four offices in Ohio alone and has representatives in Mexico and Europe. The company’s inspectors conduct about 90,000 investigations every working day, reporting mostly on individuals. They investigate applicants for insurance and claimants of insurance, they also check people’s credit, and they conduct investigations of job applicants for clients. Their firm has 38,000 client accounts that include many of the world’s largest companies.

      Much of the surveillance of individuals by trained investigators has been made easier by the proliferation of record-keeping in our increasingly bureaucratic society. I found it startling to learn how much information about one’s private life is readily available to any skilled investigator who knows where to check accessible records and make a few routine inquiries. Detectives told me some of the presumably private information about myself—or just about any adult who is not a hermit—that an investigator could readily produce in most areas of the United States. They were referring just to an “easy” kind of checkout. An investigator in the New York State area could produce for a curious client most of the facts about you or me listed below, and it could be done within a few days. Here are the facts:

      —Whether there are any significant blemishes on your record where you have worked.

      —How much money you have in your checking account at the bank (roughly), whether you borrow money often and for what, whether you have been delinquent in paying back loans, and whether you have any outstanding loans.

      —Whether you are a poor credit risk.

      —Whether you have ever suffered from mental illness for which you were confined, been treated for a heart ailment, or been a victim of convulsive disorders. (This information can often be found in a public document—one’s original application for a driver’s license.)

      —Whether you are a known sexual deviate.

      —Whether you actually received that college degree, if you claim one.

      —Whether you have ever been arrested, or had any lawsuits filed against you.

      —A good surmise as to whether you were legitimately born, when and where, and the occupation of your parents at the time.

      —Your net worth (provided you have a sizable unsecured bank loan), the value of your home, its layout and construction, its furnishings and upkeep, and what kinds of locks there are on your doors.

      —Whether you have been involved in an automobile accident in recent years.

      —Whether your loyalty has ever been questioned by any of the better-known investigative bodies, public or private.

      —Whether you are a registered Democrat, Republican, or have failed to register a party preference.

      When I expressed curiosity about my own credit rating one detective said, “Give me a couple of hours.” Within that period he called and gave me data from a credit report on me. It contained a fairly thorough summary of my life, employers, agents, abodes, and offspring for the past two decades, and the precise assessed value of my home in Connecticut. He chuckled and added: “They say that, though you pay your bills, you occasionally take your time about it.” He added that such reports often will provide a guess as to the person’s annual income but that apparently my income was too erratic for a guess to be made.

      Most American adults with jobs, cars, houses, charge accounts, insurance, and military or government records can assume that at least one specific dossier on them—more probably several—has been compiled. Most contain facts that are, by and large, relatively impersonal. But a great many hundreds of thousands of these dossiers contain thick reports with intimate details. Many also contain erroneous or adverse information.

      The U.S. Civil Service Commission, which maintains a dossier on nearly everyone who has applied for federal employment since 1939, reportedly has nearly 250,000 dossiers that contain adverse information.

      Its central index of approximately 7,500,000 dossiers is just one of the many central files on individuals that have grown to enormous proportions in recent years. The Defense Department maintains a central index of members of the armed forces, civilian employees, and a great many other people, including scientists working for defense contractors. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, of course, has its extensive central file. The House Un-American Activities Committee reportedly has accumulated a card file of more than a million names. The Association of Casualty and Surety Companies maintains a vast nationwide clearinghouse of information regarding claimants. Very recently its file contained 18,200,000 entries on claimants for bodily injury or workmen’s compensation. The bureau investigates or scrutinizes about one fourth of all claims, which means it conducts about 500,000 investigations a year. And then, of course, there are the credit bureaus in every part of the United States as well as in Canada, England, and Australia that are affiliated with the Associated Credit Bureaus of America. Through rapid exchange arrangements any bureau can draw upon files kept on more than 100,000,000 individuals.

      The private investigative firm Retail Credit Company has files on more than 42,000,000 individuals. These files consist of previous reports the firm has made on individuals, significant newspaper clippings, and available public records about individuals. The company points out to prospective clients that its massive files can strengthen and support any current investigations it makes.

      A further indication of the increase in surveillance since the beginning of World War II is the tremendous amount of electronic eavesdropping that now occurs. An electronics expert familiar with the practices of U.S. intelligence agencies told me: “In all major cities” the government maintains hotel rooms with eavesdropping equipment already installed through a nearby wall. When a person under surveillance goes to such a hotel, “the proper authorities arrange for him to be put in the proper room,” he said.

      The United States of course is not the only country in which eavesdropping has been growing. The Russians have a very large head start. An American with Communist sympathies who had lived inside Russia a few years and then returned to America cited to acquaintances as one of his grievances about the Russian system that electronic listening devices were everywhere.

      Of the many forms of electronic surveillance, wiretapping has had the most public attention in the U.S., not because it is the most pernicious and rampant, but simply because it has generated the most political heat. Unlike the hiding of microphones and cameras, which is more invasive of privacy, wiretapping is a federal crime, although the Justice Department for its own good reasons takes a tortured view of the law and an interestingly lax approach to enforcing even its own view.

      The Justice Department and law-enforcement officials in a few states are pressing hard for clear-cut permission to wiretap in investigating certain suspected criminal activities. At one Senate hearing the Attorney General explained: “We are balancing off the right of privacy versus the need for better law enforcement. . . Many Americans, particularly those apprehensive about crime, would insist the “balance” tips far more heavily toward law enforcement.

      During one session attended by the Attorney General, Senator John A. Carroll of Colorado raised a crucial point. He wondered if there СКАЧАТЬ