The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ more fundamental to society was not being neglected: “the right of every citizen to his privacy.”

      As this book is being completed, late January, 1964, the Federal Communications Commission, after many years of virtually ignoring the mounting problem of electronic eavesdropping, has invited comment on proposed rules seeking to curb one kind of electronic surveillance. That would be the kind requiring the use of radio transmitters, whether for bugging or wiretapping. Even if we assume the rules are issued, their enforcement probably will be delayed pending court challenges brought by manufacturers. This action is long overdue. However, it seems doubtful that these proposed rules would significantly diminish eavesdropping because of the broad exceptions written into them. For example they make an exception for actions by law-enforcement agencies. They also except any situation where one party to the conversation knows of the eavesdropping.

      Still another dimension of surveillance can be seen in the growing suspiciousness toward employees that has gripped much of U.S. industry. One of the nation’s fastest-growing trade associations is the American Society for Industrial Security. Its membership grew from 1800 to 2500 in two recent years. And at a recent convention members were treated to a comprehensive display of bugging devices. A Washington newspaper called them “more frightening than any Black Widow spider.” A spokesman for one of the displayers boasted that he didn’t believe there was “any escape from this sort of equipment.”

      Along with the industrial espionage a new and more subtle surveillance is occurring throughout the land: psychological espionage of employees and school children.

      The growing surveillance—and here I’ve just given a glimpse of its many manifestations—is inevitably exerting a significant impact upon the behavior patterns and value systems of the millions of citizens involved. The person who finds he is not trusted tends to strike back by becoming indeed untrustworthy. And the person who finds himself being watched, electronically or otherwise, tends unwittingly to become careful in what he does and says. This breeds not only sameness but a watchfulness completely untypical of the exuberant, free-wheeling American so commonly accepted as typical of this land in earlier decades. The American Civil Liberties Union has observed (correctly, I believe), “A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that the people are apprehensive of being overheard or spied upon.”

      The former district attorney of Philadelphia, Mr. Samuel Dash, who made an exhaustive survey of eavesdropping in several states during the fifties,³ told a Senate committee: “In cities where wiretapping was known to exist there was generally a sense of insecurity among professional people and people engaged in political life. Prominent persons were constantly afraid to use their telephones despite the fact that they were not engaged in any wrongdoing. It was clear that freedom of communication and the atmosphere of living in a free society without fear were handicapped by the presence of spying ears.”

      The closing in upon the privacy of the individual comes not only from the outright scrutiny of individuals but also from multiplying rules and regulations and from ever mounting requirements for licenses. There is the new insistence that one be traceable from cradle to grave. Bess E. Dick, staff director of the House Committee on the Judiciary, complained to me: “There is a crowding in.” You are required to “live just this way and no other way.” She felt the typical citizen is robbed of eccentricity.

      Among the numerous rights heretofore considered characteristically American that we seem to be in danger of scuttling are:

      —The right to be different.

      —The right to hope for tolerant forgiveness or overlooking of past foolishnesses, errors, humiliations, or minor sins—in short, the Christian notion of the possibility of redemption.

      —The right to make a fresh start.

      America was largely settled, and its frontiers expanded, by people seeking to get away from something unpleasant in their pasts, either oppression, painful episodes, poverty, or misdemeanors.

      Today it is increasingly assumed that the past and present of all of us—virtually every aspect of our lives—must be an open book; and that all such information about us can be not only put in files but merchandised freely. Business empires are being built on this merchandising of information about people’s private lives. The expectation that one has a right to be let alone—the whole idea that privacy is a right worth cherishing—seems to be evaporating among large segments of our population.

      There appears to be little awareness today among the complacent that no one is secure unless everyone is secure from the overeager constable, the over-zealous investigator, and the over-nosy bureaucrat. Totalitarianism typically begins when a would-be tyrant—whether a Hitler or a Castro—plays upon the anxieties of the majority to institute repressive measures against despised or troublesome minorities. Gradually the repressive measures are extended, perhaps inexorably, to larger and larger segments of the populace.

      It was to protest the possibility of such an eventuality in the U.S.A. that Mr. Justice Brandeis issued his eloquent dissent in a case in 1928 involving surveillance. He said:

      “The makers of our Constitution . . . sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most valued by civilized men.”

      Today, as we shall see, the Bill of Rights is under assault from many directions. Thomas Jefferson’s vow that he had sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man has a quaint ring to many people in 1964. Aldous Huxley commented that the classic cry of Patrick Henry that he wanted either liberty or death now sounds melodramatic. Instead today, Huxley contended, we are more apt to demand, “Give me television and hamburgers but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty.”

      It is worth noting that Mr. Huxley’s prophetic book, Brave New World, written way back in the thirties about a technological society living in doped-up bliss under a watchful tyrant six centuries from now, has been banned from several U.S. schools. Also among the banned is George Orwell’s 1984, depicting life under the ever-present electronic eye and ear of a tyrannical Big Brother a bare two decades from now. When the U.S. Commissioner of Education was asked about the banning of these two classics from a Miami high school, he declined to comment because he said he had never heard of either of the books!

      Many of the present invasions of our privacy originate in the kinds of life the citizens have chosen to pursue. Often such intrusions can be checked only by an aroused concern about individual rights. Other of the invasions, as we shall see, are susceptible to legal restraint. In general the legal checks are in a state of lamentable confusion, vagueness, or neglect. One judge has described the state of the law of privacy, for example, as “still that of a haystack in a hurricane.”

      In the chapters that follow, let us then try to understand what is happening to our privacy—and our freedom—as individuals in the face of the new kinds of pressure generated by our violently changing world. As we explore this subject we might bear in mind a haunting comment made to me by Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, who has led several battles for individual rights on the floor of Congress. He said:

      “Basically I am not hopeful about the pressures that will in time make our country something of a police state. Unless we can bring a release from the prolonged Cold War and can check the inward drift of our country, I sense a losing game.”

2. Five Forces Undermining Our Privacy

      “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.”—Chief Justice СКАЧАТЬ