The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States

by Brian Hochman

Overview

They’ve been listening for longer than you think. A new history reveals how—and why.

Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early twentieth century—and they have spied on their own customers too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here?

In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government’s wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike.

From wayward lovers to foreign spies, from private detectives to public officials, and from the silver screen to the Supreme Court, The Listeners traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States. Along the way, Brian Hochman considers how earlier generations of Americans confronted threats to privacy that now seem more urgent than ever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674249288
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	494,786
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Brian Hochman is Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, which was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Laura Romero Prize for Best First Book.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Ballad of D. C. Williams 1

Part 1 Dirty Business

1 Stolen Signals and Whispering Wires 29

2 Detective Burns Goes to Washington 54

3 To Intercept and Divulge 76

4 The Wiretapper's Nest 98

Part 2 The Bug in the Martini Olive

5 Eavesdroppers 119

6 Tapping God's Telephone 139

Part 3 The Listening Age

7 Title III 173

8 Big Brother, Where Art Thou? 201

9 Limited Assistance Necessary 220

10 Off the Wire 241

Epilogue: King's Gall, Hoover's Tap 275

Notes 285

Acknowledgments 339

Index 343

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/29/2021

Georgetown University English professor Hochman (Savage Preservation) explores in this fascinating history how wiretapping by U.S. law enforcement agencies went from a “dirty business” to a “standard investigative tactic.” Meticulously combing through Supreme Court opinions, trial transcripts, and even pulp fiction, Hochman traces how political, corporate, and popular opinions of wiretapping evolved from the invention of the telegraph in the mid–19th century through the war on drugs in the 1990s, when Congress passed legislation requiring phone companies “to build technical surveillance capacities” into their networks and granting law enforcement access to call location data. Contending that today’s “regime of ubiquitous backdoor surveillance” wasn’t inevitable, Hochman notes a major shift in the late 1960s when civil rights protests and racial uprisings in the Watts neighborhood of L.A.; Newark, N.J.; and other U.S. cities sparked a conservative backlash that led to the implementation of “repressive law enforcement policies,” including wiretapping, aimed largely at communities of color. Hochman lucidly explains complex legal matters and fills the book with such intriguing yet little-known characters as Jim Vaus, an LAPD wiretapper turned Christian evangelist, who shot to fame with tales of his “bugging exploits” in the 1950s. This is an essential and immersive look at “what happens when we sideline privacy concerns in the interest of profit motives and police imperatives.” (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Smart, entertaining, and occasionally alarming…Hochman narrates a century and a half of wiretapping, from the Civil War to the War on Terror. What emerges is a powerful prehistory of today’s private sector and government surveillance regimes. Hochman reveals the surprising strength of public resistance to all forms of electronic surveillance until the 1960s. And, crucially, he shows how national leaders used the racial backlash politics of the late 1960s to normalize government eavesdropping and build the world we live in today.

New Republic - Andrew Lanham

Brian Hochman’s deeply researched, eminently readable, and intensely timely book excavates the history of electronic surveillance from the telegraph to the planetary infrastructures and corporations that have become inextricable from everyday life. Along the way, he shows how widespread resistance to wiretapping may provide a guide to addressing some of the most urgent questions about the implications of living in a fully connected world.

Trevor Paglen

A fascinating look at the battle between surveillance and privacy in the United States over the past 150 years.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Harrison Blackman

The moral of The Listeners’s 150-year history is what Hochman calls the devastating ‘banality of electronic surveillance in America.’ Espionage was and remains dependent on technologies so central to everyday life they appear mundane—and it has always hinged on the work of ordinary people who, for better or worse, often consider their labor anything but extraordinary. Today, high-tech surveillance perniciously extends state power precisely because so many of us are bound up in its mechanizations, whether we want to be or not.

Boston Review - Sophia Goodfriend

Fast-paced, compulsively readable, artfully researched, and historically astute, The Listeners reminds us that Americans once cared about privacy—and that we should too.

Richard R. John

The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States weaves different kinds of history together in a single, compelling story about the rise of electronic surveillance, police secrecy, and technology. It’s a story about how electronic surveillance has become ordinary and acceptable: how the technology and the uses for the technology developed; then, how ordinary citizens understood and experienced the technology over time.

Claire Potter

[This] thoughtful, searching history reminds us that the practice of wiretapping was steeped from the start in lawlessness…Wiretapping, in the public’s mind, was what crooks did…The Listeners does a wonderful job evoking a world shaped by intense distaste for surveillance, even if the sharp emotions that once energized the battle now seem lost to history.

Grayson Clary

A fun read…This is a history of uneasiness and discomfort with the way an emerging technology can reshape the nature of private and public life…Show[s] how the United States became a nation of proud ‘freedom lovers’ who also willingly accept Facebook and Google making fortunes from their data. For anyone looking for a prehistory of the ambivalent and paradoxical aspects of American thought around digital surveillance, this is your book.

History Today - Rebecca Onion

Hochman makes a compelling case that concerns about threats to privacy that had been widely shared by Americans were pushed to the margins by claims that eavesdropping was necessary to enforce Prohibition, defeat drug dealers, prevent race riots, and protect national security…An engaging and informative account of wiretapping in American popular culture.

Psychology Today - Glenn C. Altschuler

Since 9/11, wiretapping in the United States has largely been viewed as the preserve of the ‘national security state.’ In The Listeners, Brian Hochman suggests a revisionist reading, in which wiretapping is diffused throughout US society, from ‘private ears’ snooping on cheating spouses to corporations fishing for dirt on rivals and police eavesdropping on poor Black communities.

Times Literary Supplement - Stephen Phillips

Listen carefully to this absorbing history of wiretapping and you’ll hear the tones of today’s surveillance society, a century and a half in the making. Brian Hochman’s splendid book reveals how a once-new technology embedded itself in American life, found novel uses, and shaped areas ranging from police tactics to privacy rights—illuminating in the process the consequences and costs of a networked world.

Sarah E. Igo

[The Listeners] deserves to be read widely…Hochman’s book constitutes a superb contribution to a topic that is in desperate need of scholarly attention.

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books - Joseph Fitsanakis

The fraught relationship between privacy and security is at the crux of The Listeners, which covers the history of eavesdropping from the Civil War to 9/11. Throughout that long history, the threat—real or imagined—of crime almost invariably took priority over civil liberties. Racist dog whistles shaped surveillance laws in 1968, and people of color historically bore the brunt (and still do) of police surveillance.

The Nation - Lora Kelly

Hochman has skilfully contributed to understanding the phenomenon of wiretapping as a dirty business during the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ways it evolved and flourished as a lawless tool in America both within and outside the state.

Technology and Culture - P. Arun

Hochman’s comprehensive and compelling narrative illustrates how the ‘dirty business’ of wiretapping has become a common and iconic feature of American life.

Cyrus Farivar

Chronicles how electronic surveillance became ‘normalized’ in the U.S.…For Hochman, the history of wiretapping ultimately feeds into the larger racial tragedy of mass incarceration and overcriminalization.

New Yorker - Jeannie Suk Gersen

Hochman narrates a history of surveillance in the United States…The Listeners is also a story about technology and the challenges around controlling or regulating it as it evolves.

PopMatters - Jordan Penney

2021-11-30
A study of how electronic surveillance became an accepted tool of law enforcement and a pervasive feature of everyday life.

Hochman, the director of American Studies at Georgetown, traces the origins of wiretapping to the Civil War, when spies on both sides learned to intercept the enemy’s telegraph messages. The war hadn’t even ended before D.C. Williams, a California commodities trader, was tapping into competitors’ telegrams to make lucrative trades. Soon, wiretaps were a standard weapon in the scam artist’s repertoire, notably in getting inside information on gambling results. With the arrival of the telephone, crooks learned to exploit the new medium, especially for blackmail purposes. Law enforcement didn’t lag far behind: New York City detectives were tapping phones as early as 1895. Hochman examines critical court cases establishing the status of wiretap evidence. A significant precedent was a 1928 case in which the Supreme Court sanctioned Prohibition agents’ use of wiretaps to convict a bootlegger. Congress tried to reverse the precedent a few years later, with the Federal Communications Act, making it illegal to intercept and divulge the contents of an electronic communication. In 1940, a secret memo by Franklin Roosevelt allowed federal wiretaps in national security cases, a decision that pleased the FBI. But in 1950, Judge Learned Hand threw out a conviction in an espionage case built largely on wiretap evidence, and the issue went back to Congress. By the 1960s, the FBI was bugging a long roster of suspected radicals, from Malcolm X to Benjamin Spock, and Nixon was recording White House conversations. The author follows the trends into the computer age, with Congress opening the gates to almost universal spying with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Amply documented, occasionally dry, this is a solid study of the legal and technical evolution of electronic spying.

A thorough history of wiretapping as it moved from a criminal act to a legitimate tool of law enforcement.

Kirkus Reviews