The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States by Brian Hochman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States by Brian Hochman P. Arun (bio) The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States By Brian Hochman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 368. Brian Hochman's The Listeners is an account of more than 150 years of wiretapping and eavesdropping over telegraph and telephone communications in America. In this chronological account, Hochman explores "how the wiretap has evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of American life" (p. 6). To do this, he meticulously unpacks the technological evolution, discusses the uses and abuses of technologies by the government and other organizations, and reexamines surveillance scandals as well as debates on surveillance and privacy over the course of time. In addition to secondary literature, the author examines historical newspapers and magazines, lawsuits, congressional hearings, investigative reports, personal interviews, pulp novels, films, and drama series. The issue of surveillance is not unique to the digital age, as such practices were also prevalent in the analog age; as Hochman says, "surveillance is, and always has been, a constitutive element of our communications ecosystem" (p. 6). Previous historical studies of wiretapping by David Kahn, James Bamford, and Athan Theoharis revolved around code-breaking, spycraft, and crushing political dissent carried out by government agencies. Following the narrative of secrecy and governmentality, these canonical texts exposed the existence of a covert discourse on wiretapping, which was "buried in the depths of the state" (p. 12). On the other hand, scholarship by Walter F. Murphy, Edith J. Lapidus, Whitfield Diffie, and Susan Landau, among others, focused on the official realm of law and policy. To present an alternative story, Hochman looks into the overt discourse on wiretapping by exploring how it was employed, debated, imagined, and experienced. He examines the intense pro-and-con debate over wiretapping policy for official use by the state, which remained unsettled until the mid-twentieth century. Besides the predominant narrative of using surveillance against communists and radicals, Hochman identifies how American lawmakers in the twentieth century presented wiretapping as a weapon to fight alcohol, crime, and drugs. Then he investigates unofficial uses for various purposes, such as private detectives hired in matrimonial cases, labor spies, and corporate espionage to gather competitive intelligence. He also traces how citizens and businesses used wiretaps and bugs. Besides the fear surrounding Big Brother in the past, there were "Big Brother's little siblings," who were "the 'listeners' the nation feared for much of the wiretap's history" (p. 9). Although Hochman explores the period of telegraph surveillance, he overlooks some crucial debates: legislative investigation committees and grand juries obtaining telegrams in an indiscriminate manner and the reactions of the public and newspapers to these practices; the eminent jurist [End Page 229] Thomas Cooley's opinion on the inviolability of telegrams, which shaped the views of many of his contemporaries, including the prominent lawyer and attorney for Western Union, Henry Hitchcock (merely cited in ch. 3 n3); and a failed but firm attempt to seek Fourth Amendment protection for the telegram in the Ex parte Brown case, where a Western Union telegraph manager was held in custody for contempt of a subpoena. The absence of these debates leads to the inaccurate view that telegraph surveillance existed and thrived without any resistance in the name of privacy. Except for partial references (in chs. 2 and 3), this book obscures wartime surveillance measures employed by the United States and the allied countries during both world wars and the popular reaction among citizens and businesses. The word "wiretap" during the telegraph era is not just a phenomenon of intercepting and monitoring messages; it carries a few other connotations such as censoring, delaying, and blocking messages. A book on the history of wiretapping in the United States definitely deserves a separate chapter on these historical developments and nuances, focusing on how citizens and businesses expressed their outrage and despair toward wartime surveillance measures. In spite of missing some of these themes, 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...