georgetown university professor brian hochman us now for a conversation about recent book the listeners history of

wiretapping in the united states. and professor hochman. it's a history goes back probably a lot further than most people would think. you began the book with the story of dc williams. who's he? so williams was a stockbroker in the state of california who concocted somewhat elaborate scheme to. listen to corporate communications and, make insider trades based on the intelligence that he'd gathered. he turns out to be the first american ever for tapping a wire. and this was in the year 1864. and he was imprisoned or convicted a statute written in the state of california, 1862, which means that the practice of wiretap being and laws against it, prohibitions against it, date back all the way to the age of the telegraph. the age of the civil war. when i discovered this.

eight years ago, i was stunned. i didn't know wiretapping went back that far and the book that i've written traces that history all the way back to the age of the telegraph up until our own digital age today, dc williams was literally tapping a telegraph wire. what does the term wire tapping as we use it today? what does it mean in today's society? so americans tend to use the term wiretapping somewhat promiscuously. we use it to refer to all manner of eavesdropping and electronic surveillance from the amazon. alexa, passively listening to your ambient ambient conversations in your home the nsa's data valence schemes. since 911. this is not what's at issue when we talk in legal terms or technological terms about the practice of wiretapping, which strictly speaking refers to the

interception of messages or conversations carried by wire from a sender to a receiver. and this is a practice, again, that dates back all the way to the 19 century when wiretapping is like williams would literally tap into splice into the telegraph network and overhear morse code as it clicked away. that's how telephone worked starting in the late 19th century, early 20th century and really up until the 1980s. that's really what we're talking about. so technologically, just so we stay on the same page here, the difference wiretapping, bugging and eavesdropping, these are confusing distinctions and they're confusing for a variety of reasons. and the law was confused on these distinctions for about 100 years, which is quite interesting. wiretapping is listening to

record a telephone conversation or even an electronic exchange, bugging is the more, strictly speaking, the use of a hidden recording equipment, hidden microphones to surreptitiously listen on private conversations. this is a practice that also dates back to the 19th century, late century, and really picks up after world war two. and where did the term eavesdropping come from? eavesdropping is a very old term. it dates back to. the historical records are a hazy on this, but it refers the practice of literally listening under the eaves of someone home where the rain drops from the roof to the ground and prohibitions against eavesdropping date back all the way to the 15th century the 16th century in the united kingdom.

but it's not until, of course, the 19th century in the united states when it comes the egis of american law a history of wiretapping in the united states. that's our conversation in this final hour of the washington journal brian hochman is our guest. he's the author of the book the listeners from harvard university press came out earlier this spring with us and here to take your phone calls, phone lines, as we had last segment regionally. so if you're in eastern or central time zones, it's 202748 8000. if you're in the mountain pacific time zones,. 202748 8001 is the number to join the conversation. we'll take this till 10 a.m. eastern. page five, your you write this that wiretapping was once a dirty business as supreme court justice. oliver wendell holmes jr famously characterized it more than 90 years ago. now it's a standard investigative tactic in indispensable in the direction

in the detection of crime and essential to the protection of national security. how did we get from there to here? how do you answer that question? well, it takes a whole book to explain it, but this is the central story that the book tells how it is that goes from a tactic that's associated with criminals and con men, dirty, unethical characters to an legally acceptable, if times controversial tactic used in the protection of crime, the protection of national security, the detection of crime, the central transition in that story from dirty business to acceptable investigative tactic, is the rise of punitive law and order politics in the 1960s, which essentially normalized the practice of wiretapping in america. it took about 100 years for the government to establish its wiretap authority, and it's only in the wake of the civil rights

uprisings of. 6619 67 that the government is able to finally get in on the act legally speaking, even though, of course they've been doing it for, for much longer. so that, i think, tells us a number of important things about the history of surveillance in this country. it's not necessarily a kind of knee jerk response, as we might think to anti-communist, cold war, anti-communism or even today terrorism priorities, but instead a kind of gradual accommodation to much more subtle and problematic set of law enforcement imperatives that i believe are critical to the rise of our carceral society, going to it being a dirty business. so we talked about dc williams, the first person convicted for wiretapping, but wiretapping, tapping a tactic used in the

civil war for military purposes is something that federal troops and confederate troops, both participated in. why was it considered a dirty business at the beginning? so wiretapping begins as a military art. the civil war is the first conflict in world history in which the use of electronic communication proves instrumental in the battlefield. and both sides, the union and the confederacy developed techniques to listen in on the enemy's conversations, so to speak speak. the tactic of wiretapping receives fawning national news coverage during the conflict throughout the conflict, and indeed both in the united states and across the atlantic, as i discovered. but very quickly after the war, it falls into disrepute as a result of character like dixie williams, the government had and

law enforcement had very little interest or even need to tap lines. in the 19th century simply because most telegraph companies kept copies of every message on file for six months or up to a year that were accessible to subpoena. it's a lot easier to file through a telegraph company's filing cabinet than it is to actually sit on the line and listen to morse code and that means that wiretapping grows up in the late 19th century as the nation's dependance on electronic communications grows at the hands of criminals and con men. and there is a real powerful association in this period and really up until the 1920s and 1930s between wiretapping the criminal elements. and this is why, setting aside longstanding kind of concerns

about privacy rights, this is why law enforcement has such trouble establishing its wiretap authority in the early of the 20th century. so what happened in the twenties and thirties, we're talking gangster era, gangster era, eliot ness, prohibition era wiretapping. this is really when the rubber meets the road and the history. this is really when law enforcement in earnest gets in on the act the date that we can point to as a landmark in this history is 1928. that's when the supreme court hands a landmark decision. fourth amendment jurisprudence known as olmstead united states that deems wiretapping constitutional, according the fourth and fifth amendments. this gives the prohibition bureau and law enforcement more generally the green light to wiretap out in the open. although they've been performing wiretaps, conducting electronic surveillance operations for decades under the radar as a

result of the gray areas in the law. so it's really the. experiment that brings wiretapping into the mainstream domain of law enforcement even then. but even then, it takes another four decades from 1928 to 1968 for the government to finally establish wiretap authority and finally establish the system of wiretap oversight that is still very much in place today. a history of wiretapping in united states. that's the subtitle of the book, the listener's brian hochman professor of georgetown university is the author joining us and let me pause here and bring in some callers on this topic. anthony miller, new york. good morning. you're on with professor hocking. thank you, professor, for joining us and thank you to the moderator as well. perhaps of you can answer my question if not today and some future segments that c-span air

on which troubled me greatly ever since barack obama came to office, he was able to wipe clean a lawsuit that had been pending. i believe it was happening, versus at&t and the nsa. the thought police have been a well-oiled machine in this governmental apparat since the beginning of time and they've only perfect it when you consider fact that mark klein was the whistleblower who came forward and exposed the nsa had been doing by illegally wiretapping. they had set up a big brother machine is what they referred to it as, whereby they were allowed to go through everybody. everything that you do, every keystroke, every phone conversation. i mean, it's it's hard for us regular people to know exactly how sophisticated the technologies have evolved. but barack obama's first signing statement as president was to dismantle that lawsuit. now, this was a standing lawsuit

against, a criminal act against the constitution, and yet it was wiped clean by a single stroke of a presidential pen. and i wonder, was that legal. i don't believe that it was. and when you weigh that into the cambridge analytical analytical scandal, what's going on with spying on our own president? you know, you had general milley, a chinese general, telling them, don't worry, you know, you've nailed this desire is but we're not going to, you know, whatever. i just to me that is this not tyranny. when you think let me pause there and get professor hochman to to chat a little bit about, i don't know, you know, about that specific case, but the nsa in general, i'm not familiar with this specific case that the caller refers to, but this charge that the caller is making of wiretapping and electronic surveillance as a form of tyranny, this is an old refrain

and was a refrain that was once. mainstream in american political culture. this is a kind of position against electronic surveillance conducted either private citizens or the government that animated both the right and the left for about a century we live in a very different political age and. those positions have, i think, been pushed somewhat to the margins. the caller's also referring to, i believe, at&t listening room it's room 606 or 612 and the folsom street, at&t switching station in san francisco. this was discovered in, i believe, 26, 27. as a result of a whistleblower that exposed at&t practice of

kind of enabling the government, nssa and other agencies to listen to private conversations through backdoor channels in the internet and telecommunications infrastructures. this, too, has long history as well as early 1895. the new york telephone company is leasing lines to the new police department. the nypd so the relationship between telecommunications companies, telecommunications industry more generally and law enforcement imperatives. this is long in the making and don't think we can see the last 1015 years of history accurately unless we see the 100 years, 120 years that preceded it. a quote from your book that jumped out the american ideal of electron privacy has never

existed in practice. so this is a provocation i two things when i say that privacy never existed in practice, when we think about communications privacy. the first is that wiretapping and electronic surveillance historically technologically speaking have been historically co extensive with rise of electronic communications. there's no such thing as electronic communications without electronic eavesdropping. so what it is that we mean when we talk about electronic privacy is somewhat fraught. i would say as a result. but that's a somewhat grim story. and the other side of that same coin, and this is the second thing that i'm referring to when i say that privacy has never existed in practice, is that privacy has animate, aided

political constituencies to work successfully against the intrusions of government and technology for about 150 years and. when i say that privacy has never existed in practice, i'm also trying to capture something of this lost sense of political, that animated so much of american political culture up until the 1960s and dissipates after the triumph of the law order coalition in the late 1960s. head up to michigan this is alan waiting. alan, good morning. yeah. good morning pop. as far as this patriot act, if you go back in time now the cole blow up an agent spent a lot of time there we had our pants and we didn't do about it right and then what a year later you get the two years later you get this stinking patriot act.

that's a heck of a name, huh? now, i held the tap shaker and compartmentalize work with admiral's navy. so the world you're talking about. although i was for perfect for us i don't have respect for the civilian world, sir. i have zero respect. let's go to those pfizer warrants now. i wasn't top and carter actually spied on as barr said they were spied on. now that you're about they've about ruined trump in every way that they can and it still continues to this day. isn't the trump he been the most scrutinized, spied on man in the history of man that's ah hackman a couple of questions there. think you know i think that that history has yet to be written. and i think we'll know a lot as

time unfolds. there's a lot in that. i think one response to offer that my at least immediate response is to suggest that the story of wiretapping in america isn't simply a story about government spooks spying on. politicians, private citizens. it's also a much prosaic story. it's also a much more mundane story. one of the things that i was shocked to discover in researching this book was just how prolific wiretapping was in the private sector up until the 1960s, 1970s, in the united states, far more lines were tapped in jurisdictions like new york. in the 1950s to litigate civil

disputes and divorce cases than there were to spy on communist, subversive or even bring down mafiosi and the like. there's a tangled history that's behind that reality, behind the numbers. but i think it suggests that the story of wiretapping and goes in directions that i think popular understanding and popular memory today are might not necessarily expect might not necessarily be familiar with and part of the work of my book is to uncover that story, which i believe is true story a true story in the sense of a record and also in sense of how earlier generations of americans understood the problem and litigated against it. what put you on the path of writing this book? i came to this project very much

by accident i stumbled upon the story of dc williams buried in the of a 19th century newspaper and was shocked to discover that wiretapping went back. so far. i'm a historian of technology, a cultural story of the united states, and i should have known better and, wanted to understand, one, the reality of that history, how far goes back and to why it is that as an educated american, i would think of wiretapping and electronic more generally as more modern and more contemporary phenomenon and, and without doing very much digging, i discovered that it wasn't a subject that had received much historical treatment. there is a lot of work that's been done in legal scholarship. surrounding the history of the

fourth amendment, surrounding the fourth amendment law, electronic surveillance law, wiretap law. but outside of the the domain of law in the domain of policy, in the domain of culture, in the domain of technology, that really hadn't been told and i had to be the one to tell it. sticking to the domain of culture, how is wiretap being how is bugging eavesdropping? how has it been portrayed in our media specific early cinema throughout the decades? so this was a very important story for me to follow. contrary to our understanding of electronic surveillance, particularly government surveillance, and pointing here at the capitol building, people often you contrary to the image of of wiretapping as the province, merely of a shadowy surveillance state that goes on behind closed doors in, the

realm of shadowy government and secrets. wiretapping has been perennial point of cultural fascination dating back to the 19th century. one of the kind of cultural documents that i was thrilled to uncover as i was working through the sources was a kind of spate of pulp novels. these tremendously popular thrillers produced in the late, early 20th centuries called wire thrillers. and these were kind of detective novels that follow code. the exploits of wire tappers, telegraph tappers on both of the law almost, always in the genre of the wire thriller wiretapping was depicted as a dirty, a seedy, a disreputable, even dishonorable activity.

and i wanted to recover something of that attitude by looking at those sources. fast forward a century to hbo's celebrated series the wire in which wiretapping is more mostly depicted as the good way to wage the war on drugs. not always effective, but certainly better than knocking heads on street corners. and i find those two historical touchstones illuminating wiretapping the turn of the 20th century as dirty, dishonorable, disreputable, and wiretapping the turn of the 21st as something that good police do. how it is that that transition takes place is much of the story. the book tells a scene from the wiretap offers an illustration from that 1906 novel with the, quote, quiet, motionless,

waiting over the sound or bent the woman la. they're listening to a telegraph tap. that's the picture from that 1906 novel we're talking with brian hochman, who wrote the book the listeners on the history of wiretapping in the united states and taking your phone calls. it's just after 930 on the east coast, a at 10 a.m. eastern, we'll end program. the house expected to a brief pro forma session this so that's where we may be going if in at that time but go ahead keep calling in on line split regionally 202748 8000. if you're in the eastern or central time zone 202748 8001. if you're in the mountain or pacific time zone this shawn in the mountain time zone. good morning this good morning i have a question the gentleman i guess he didn't answer it from the last but when obama and clapper can spy on a presidential and biden and then biden can read a presidential house and then now got

zuckerberg come out to say the fbi is involved in and telling him that buried the biden story isn't this like absolute corruption they all these departments that little cuba behind you needs to be shut down this is just absolute corruption thank you, sean in colorado, the intersection of presidents and wiretapping in the history. sure i unfortunately can't speak to these questions any kind of authority. my book is a history it stops generally speaking in. 2001 and of course it came out before these recent revelations. what i can say and what know for now is that wiretapping, when i conducted by the federal government or by municipal or state law, enforced it is conducted under a rigorous set

of judicial safeguards. so i think we'll find out more about how that kind of current controversy came to be. but generally speaking, when wires are tapped, they're done aboveboard and the system that the federal government put in place in 1968 with the passage of the omnibus crime control and safe streets act title of that law is the federal wiretap act. and in 1978, with a foreign intelligence surveillance act, these are are are pretty much followed to the letter of the law. for better or for worse, your book is a history of the of wiretapping in the united states. how would that history be different if it looking at other countries around world. so that's really great question

and. i invite other scholars and historians to write a book on it story. yeah, there's only so much there's only so many wiretaps that one can follow. the american story looks different from obviously the story of wiretap being an electronic surveillance in. governments, you know, countries like, russia in the age of the soviet union, east germany in the age the soviet union, or even latin america under military dictatorships. those are very different stories from, the american story, but also more democratic nations who have similar communications infrastructures. and similarly legal regimes. the united kingdom or even canada. their story looks quite different from ours for a couple of reasons.

the first reason why the american story looks different because it happened here. first, the the techniques of technical that, we would become wiretapping and bugging were pioneered in the united states context and secondly, there's a far more robust, i think, tradition of civil liberties and rights activism in. the united states that has the history that i've traced and it's one reason why it took so long to pass a federal wiretap law. the united states in 1968. it took a century, whereas in canada took a couple of years. and the united kingdom took less than that is because most americans didn't like wiretapping and they believed that it was a dirty business and

that political consensus won the day for the better part of a century. one reason why our story is different from the story of other nations it's because ordinary americans pushed back. sumpter, south carolina, this is audrey. good morning. good morning. john how much? i actually guess the question, if i may, please. yes, ma'am. have you looked at the wiretapping, doing the civil rights era? and how did that came about in what you learned from it? absolutely. i was listening for my answer off air. thanks for the question. this is an important story that the book. the caller is referring to, the fbi's surveillance activities in the fifties and 1960s, in particular are harassing and civil rights leaders, martin

luther king most especially, but also elijah muhammad, malcolm x, stokely carmichael and many others. this is a really important story that the book follows. but also i want to follow another story that's happening alongside it, which is how the triumph of a kind of law and order style politics, which is essentially a racialized politics wins. in the 1960s as a result of, the civil rights revolution. and essentially, lee empowers law enforcement to. wiretap a far, i think, less visible of the american public. and that's of color who are on the front lines, what would become known as the war on

drugs. so while the book traces that history of martin luther king and it also traces the history of the martin luther king recordings, which have remained under seal since the 1970s. it also traces how wiretapping becomes normalized in the workings of american law enforcement in the name of the war drugs. and by the upwards of, 80 to 90% of wires that are tapped in this country in any given year are done for that specific purpose wage the war on drugs. and communities of color are at the front lines of that conflict. why are those martin luther king recordings still seal? more than 50 years later. so this is a really interesting and crazy story. the story of martin luther king being bugged. hoover's fbi is well, and it was in fact, well known during king's own life was a part of

the public record. shortly following his death. the recordings themselves. were put under seal as a result of church committee investigations of the federal intelligence community in the 1970s and have remained under seal ever since. politicians those on the right have attempted to unseal those recordings over time in efforts to. tarnish legacy, tarnish his name, most famously in the run up to passage of martin luther king as a federal holiday. jesse helms and the notorious segregationist senator from north carolina tried to on seal those documents. he was rebuffed and generation of politicians and also

historians tried to get at their contents through creative means. they'll be unsealed in. 2027 and we'll have to see what happens then. heading to jeff dearborn, michigan. good morning. your next. jeff, you're us, sir. what a stingray and a what? a stingray. listening devices and what dirt bikes is. we can take those up. a stingray listening device. so i don't know what a dirt fox is. stingray is essentially a fake cell phone tower. it's also as an imc catcher. and this is a device that was developed on the private market in the 1980s and 1990s. and has become favored tool of

law enforcement in the 21st century. the use of the stingray has grown up in the gray of the law for quite some time. it's unclear whether it's legal use a stingray or not. it can be used in certain jurisdictions can't and others. but it's cropped up in recent in ice investigations in detroit in drug investigations in baltimore and even in the monitoring of black lives matter protests and activism in chicago. this is an important story that i didn't quite have room to fit into the book, but it tracks along with the history of wiretapping. the wiretap grows up in american law enforcement in the same

kinds of legal gray areas. questions like is legal for law enforcement to wiretap if it's not permissible to use the fruits of that wiretap in a court law? is it legal to? tap a telephone. in a state for the feds, so to speak, to tap a telephone in the state where wiretapping is prohibited. these are all kind of tangled legal questions, questions of jurisdiction questions, of legal theory that get worked out over the course of a long century. up until the 1960s and the use of the stingray, like the use of facial recognition technologies, law enforcement today operates in similar kinds of legal gray. and we'll see how those questions get resolved as time unfolds. on a more recent tangled legal

question, what was the operation of root canal? so operation root canal was an effort by the fbi in the 1990s to essentially build a backdoor into the the nation's evolving communications infrastructure. starting in the 1980s, with the break up of bell system and the technological revolution and communications that ensued, the birth of mobile phones pagers, fax machines, and also especially the revolution in optic communications. and ultimately then digital networks. this court had tremendous problems for law enforcement. it meant that they necessarily wiretap lines in the way that they had. and in order get around this problem, they sought political

relief. in 1990, the fbi goes to congress to begin to essentially force the communications industry to build surveillance capacities into their new networks. a backdoor a backdoor. the communications pushes back, notably in the name of privacy but also in the name of profit. and ultimately, this leads to the passage, a landmark law often forgotten today in 1994, known as the communications for law enforcement act. this is calea, and this is a law that requires communications companies to build surveillance capacity into their new technologies. the internet, which was then a nascent communications environment, wasn't covered under calea, but.

telephone. and other forms of data were. and this was the first time that the government essentially goes on record requiring innovations to be surveillance ready. and this is the result of this kind of backdoor on the part of the fbi that had called operation root canal quite. amusingly to my opinion forked river new jersey. this is sherry next. good morning. good morning. now, since trump isn't in office anymore and it's common that the fbi tapped the white house, i was wondering many other presidents. has the fbi tapped in the white house while they were presidents? is there other presidents that the fbi spied on besides trump, or is trump the only one they pat? what other presidents have? that's your question.

so we should note that the white house itself was not wiretapped, as far as we know. and we also note that any wires that were tapped in the trump administration were done under or both. and title three, oversight. other presidents, most famously richard nixon, of course, recorded their own conversations. so did lyndon johnson. nixon himself, of course, is well known for weaponizing the use of the and the use of its surveillance capacities. so there is a great deal of precedent here as well. i'm not sure if that exactly answers the question, but starting with johnson presidents often recorded their conversations via telephone. and nixon himself if as the

caller probably knows, recorded his exchanges in the oval office for a variety of reasons. so we're not necessarily in unprecedented territory. you call it in the book a personal when somebody can have a device that records themselves. you talk about nixon in the white. what about google home and alexa's that people have in their own homes and questions that's raised about wiretapping. so as i mentioned the you know the google home, the amazon alexa these are not technically wiretaps, but they are listening devices and it's well known that they listen to ambient noise, ambient conversation passively, even when you're not them. this is an emerging area of research. but one of the things that i find so fascinating about the widespread use of alexa and

alexa, like technologies is just how normal they are and just how many americans by far the majority kind of reside themselves to the implication that their conversations may be monitored in one form or another and it may actually be in their interest as consumer owners to have their data monitored. you're going to get better advertised minutes, you're going to get better deals. and also, it's just a sort of gateway problem that we all have to kind of accommodate ourselves to when we turn on our phones or go on the we know that our location is going to be tracked. we know that you our conversations may be monitored. americans as late as the 1960s would have been horrified at our resignation. and one of the things that i want to uncover in the book is

just how it is that that resignation comes about, just how it is, how our sense of wiretapping and eavesdropping as normal as just the way the internet works is just the way our communication environment works. that's that's one of the stories that the book tells. but, yes, i think this is an emerging area of research and the amazon alexa, you have in your home. it is listening with about 10 minutes left this morning with brian hochman. you can go ahead and keep calling in. but in your book, you mention that every american generation has a scandal. what are some of the most interesting you that we haven't gotten to yet? so every generation seems to uncover wiretapping anew with

fresh. outrage about a decade or so. there's a kind of cycle of resignation and outrage. the earliest national scandal pertaining to wiretapping in the united states happens in new york city in 1916. and this is a very interesting and complicated affair that involves multiple entities. but at the root of it was a slightly corrupt. mayor's office that had coerced the new york police department or force the police department to spy on five catholic priests who were suspected of charity fraud and along the way, the nypd was also working at the same time with a private investigator named william burns, who was in those days the

most famous private investigator in, the united states. this a national scandal. it hit the headlines of every major newspaper across the united states in 1916, 1917. what it was that john mitchell's office was doing these catholics, priests who had their telephone conversations tapped and burns, this private detective who was the center of it in question of all ways. what's interesting about scandal is that all of the major players involved escaped unscathed. and burns, who was at the center of controversy, later became the first head of the bureau of investigation, the entity that would become the fbi. so wiretapping works in interesting ways. i found and these generational

scandals were somewhat surprising to me to uncover. and there's all sorts of interesting stories to follow that i detail in the book and that would be ripe for further research as well. the book, again, listeners a history of wiretapping in the united states from harvard university press brian hochman a professor at georgetown. taking your phone calls about that history. this is randy in kentucky. good morning. good morning. thank you. the future, you know, they say that they'll be able to read your results in the future. there's going to be brain wiretapping. and will you be responsible criminally, your thoughts that you might have that are negative. and also, what makes it a crime to have thoughts or to talk to someone about committing a crime? i know you say it's a conspiracy, but that person has paid taxes for that wire transmission or whatever internet. we pay taxes for that all the

time. how come i don't get to share in that the way i want to equally or others? and we just continue to say everyone's a conspirator and we put them in prison for that without even committing a crime. professor hoffman so the story of the government or of shadowy corporate entities or even of private citizens as having the ability to wiretap the brain, as the caller says, this is a very old story. and in the 1960s, mainstream politicians were warning of the thought police, big brother and the government's capacities to listen in using all manner of dystopian innovations such as the bug, among others. the future is hard to say. it's hard to divine.

don't ever think it's going to go that far. but i think there are some very interesting technology uses that are in place today that we should about as part of future and, part of the future of privacy and tech and technology in america. the most important device that i've been thinking about practice that. i've been thinking about technology, that i've been thinking one that resembles think the history of wiretapping to a great degree is the use of facial recognition technologies, particularly by law enforcement. this is a practice that grown up in the gray areas of the law. it's also a practice that has great technological fallibility as investigative journalists and activists have uncovered. it's hard to say where the debate surrounding facial recognition are going to go, but i think if the history is any

pretext, we're going to be having these debates for quite a long time to come, which is why i think it's important to know where we came from. akron, ohio, this is ed. good morning. yes. thanks for taking my call. my question is you said that the wiretapping thing had such a hard time getting a in the united states opposed other countries because the american citizens were so much against it. if do you believe that that's possibly still the case that the majority of america would rather not be wiretapped or, you know, that it's it's it's against our civil rights to. listen to our private conversations and that the federal government just don't care and they do they want to do in the name of get the drug dealers because if you make anything so terrible all that it's it matter what we do to go after. then it's okay to do because

they're so terrible. that's all i got. thanks. this is a great question. i think. all american ends would be horrified if there line was tapped one way or another. but interestingly, all of the current social science research suggests that digital resignation, surveillance or resignation has really eroded our sense of privacy and the vast majority of americans speaking have accommodated themselves to monitoring of their data, their communications in one form or another another. what i think that means is that fighting back against the

incursions of technology is something of uphill battle, much more of an a much more of an uphill battle than it was even as late as 1966, 1967. far more americans numerically in those days had, a mainstream, earnest commitment to privacy and congress. washington, in the name of civil liberties and in the name of civil rights, also made good on those popular beliefs and that kind of mainstream sense of that privacy is central to american political life. again today that's not so the case. and not only have we resigned ourselves to our data being monitored by corporate firms, by social media companies and the

like, but also, i think we regard wiretapping, law enforcement, surveillance that goes on in the name of enforcement priorities like war on drugs as essentially good police work. so there really has been an erosion over time. and while i think it's true and all of the callers would probably agree that, you know, if we had our own telephones, we would probably be horrified. but at the same time, all the research suggests that we've resigned ourselves to this reality that i think makes the future pretty for the ordinary american citizen. as we wait for the house to come in again, a brief pro forma session this morning and we'll take you there for gavel to gavel coverage when they do. an interesting question from canyon on twitter, but you could also take it historically well asking does the government just assume that all unencrypted traffic is public information

and therefore fair game for the surveillance system, specifically that internet traffic. but this a question that could be asked time and again throughout american history. it does and it doesn't. it depends on what kind of traffic, what platform you're using the legal. kind of protocols here. the regulations are byzantine and numerous generally speaking, however, the government has one rule that we can say that holds throughout the history of wiretapping and electronic surveillance in america from the 19th century to the present, is that the government much more interested in data and communications that at rest as opposed to data and communications that are in motion live. it's just easier to get a hold of story and communications than

it is to sit on a wire or tap a telephone. in the 1940s, 1950s, stored communications are much different and legally speaking, it's easier for law enforcement to acquire those stored communications than it is to actually sit on your telephone line. those relationships are changing slightly as a result of a series of landmark supreme court cases in the mid 20 tens. but that rule still holds for a lot more on the history of wiretapping in the united states. the book is the listeners the author brian hochman, a professor at georgetown university on twitter. it's at underscore hochman

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