Activity

With the news concerning Julian Assange ….
To paraphrase refined Southern Women of the late 19th century in the manner, it is said, to have referred to the recently concluded Civil War …
In the future that which we will refer to as “our most recent unpleasantness.” has begun, I fear, with the arrest of Assange.

In the piece that follows below I find it interesting how prescient Rovere was in 1958 …
Enjoy! as much as possible …

This is part of a series that appeared in …

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
Volume 27, Number 4, Autumn 1958

THE INVASION OF PRIVACY (1)

TECHNOLOGY AND THE CLAIMS OF COMMUNITY

by RICHARD H. ROVERE

It is repeatedly asserted by solicitous groups and individuals that the right of privacy – described once by Mr. Justice Brandéis as the “right to be let alone . . . the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men” – is in sorry shape in this Republic today. The evidence is impressive. Wiretapping is epidemic; even where it is illegal, it flourishes, and some authorities believe that the number of telephones being monitored on any given day runs into the hundreds of thousands. “Bugging,” the use of concealed electronic devices by absentee eavesdroppers, is an almost universal practice among policemen, private detectives, and both public and private investigators. People describing themselves as “investigators” are as numerous and as pestiferous, it often seems, as flies in late September. Each day, more and more of us are
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required to tell agencies of government more and more about ourselves; and each melancholy day, government agencies are more and more about us. Someone in the F.B.I. – not Mr. Hoover, certainly, but someone – slips a “raw” file to a favored congressman; the President instructs the Bureau of Internal Revenue to turn over income tax returns to an investigating committee; the Defense Department gives medical records to an insurance adjuster. The existence of the files, apart from their disclosure, may itself be regarded as a violation of privacy; we are compelled to leave bits and pieces of ourselves in many places where we would just as soon not be.
Broadly speaking, invasions of privacy are of two sorts, both on the increase. There are those, like wire tapping and bugging and disclosure of supposedly confidential documents, that could conceivably be dealt with by changes in law or public policy. Then there are those that appear to be exercises of other rights — for example, freedom of speech, of the press, of inquiry. A newspaper reporter asks an impertinent personal question; the prospective employer of a friend wishes to know whether the friend has a happy sex life; a motivational researcher wishes to know what we have against Brand X deodorant; a magazine wishing to lure more advertisers asks us to fill out a questionnaire on our social, financial and intellectual status. Brandeis’ “right to be let alone” is unique in that it can be denied us by the» powerless as well as by the powerful – by a teen-ager with a portable radio as well as by a servant of the law armed with a subpoena.
Most of those who publicly lament the decline of privacy talk as if they believe that the causes are essentially political; they seem to feel that enemies of individual rights are conspiring to destroy privacy just as certain of them have sought, in recent years, to destroy the right to avoid self-incrimination. Some also see privacy eroding as a consequence of a diminishing respect for it. I think there may be something in both points, although a good deal less in the first than in the second; but it seems to me that the really important causes lie elsewhere – in our advancing technology and in the growing size and complexity of our society. Until the early part of this century, the right of privacy was seldom invoked. Though its
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broadest and most binding guarantee is in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which affirms “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, it was not until 1905 squarely upheld the right of privacy. The jurisdiction was Georgia and the court laid it down as a common-law proposition the “the right of privacy has its foundations in the instincts of nature.” In a thinly populated land, with government touching only lightly the everyday lives of citizens and with a technology that people had to depend on their own eyes and ears to know what others were up to, men armed with the Fourth Amendment with the squirrel gun permitted them under the Second Amendment could pretty well attend to their own privacy. Mostly, one supposes, it was not thought of as a “right” to be protected but as a condition of life cherished by some and merely accepted by others.
But then came the camera, the telephone, the graduated income tax, and later the tape recorder, the behavioral scientist, television (now being used to follow us as we move about supermarkets and department stores as a kind of radar for the light-fingered), professional social worker, “togetherness” and a host of other developments that are destructive of privacy as a right and as a condition. Soundproofing is the only technological contribution that I can think of that has been an aid to the right to be let alone. The rest have lent themselves to invasions of privacy, and the end sight. Wire tapping, for example, is now in the process of being fully automated; where formerly the number of wires tapped was limited by the number of personnel that could be assigned to sitting around all day waiting for a conversation to intercept, today innumerable phones can be monitored entirely by machines. Someday, no doubt, we shall be spied upon from space platforms equipped with television cameras. And all this time the welfare state has been developing – in the main, of course, as a response to technology … ARTICLE CONTINUES.