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an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history tv documents america story. and on sunday, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span two comes from these television companies and more. including buckeye broadband. >> ♪ ♪ ♪ >> buckeye broadband, along with these television companies, support c-span 2 as a public service. >> georgetown university professor brian hochman joins us now for a conversation about his book, the listeners: a history of wiretapping in the united states. professor hochman, it's a history that goes back further than a lot of people would think. you begin the book with the story of d.c. williams.

who is he? >> williams was a stockbroker in the state of california who concocted a somewhat elaborate scheme to listen to corporate communications and make insider trades, essentially, based on the information he gathered. he turns out to be the first american ever jailed for tapping a wire, in 1864. he was imprisoned or convicted under a statute written in the state of california in 1862. which means that the practice of wiretapping and laws against it, prohibitions against, it date back all the way to the age of the telegraph. each of the civil war. when i discovered this story, eight years ago, i was stunned. i don't know wiretapping went back about four. the book that i've written traces that history all the way to the age of the telegraph, up

and to our own digital age today. >> dc williams was literally tapping a telegraph wire. what does the term wiretapping, as we use it today, mean in today's society? >> americans tend to use the term wiretapping somewhat promiscuously. we use it to referred all manner of electronic eavesdropping, electronic surveillance. from the amazon alexa passively listening, to be at, noise and be a conversations in your home, to the nsa's data valence schemes since 9/11. this is not exactly what that issue when we talk in legal terms, technological terms, about the practice of wiretapping. which, strictly speaking, refers to the interception of messages, conversations carried by wire live, from asunder to a receiver. this is a practice, again, that dates all the way to the 19th

century. when wiretap or's like williams would literally tap into, splice into, the telegraph network. and over here is morris code as it clicked away. that's how telegraphed tapping worked in the late 19th century, early 20th century, really up until the 19 80s that's what we are talking about. >> technologically, just so we stay on the same page here, the difference between wiretapping, bugging and eavesdropping? >> these are confusing distinctions. and 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 a, recording it telephone conversation, even an electronic exchange. bugging is the, more strictly speaking, the use of hidden

recording equipment, he did microphones, to surreptitiously listen in on private conversations. this is the practice that also dates back to the 19th century, the late 19th century, it really picks up after world war ii. >> and where did the term eavesdropping come from? >> eavesdropping is a very old term. it dates back to -- historical records are hazy on this, but it refers to the practice of literally listening under the eaves of someone else's home, where the raindrops from the roof to the ground. but prohibitions against eavesdropping date back all the way to the 15th century, 16th century in the united kingdom. but it's not until, of course, the 19th century in the united states when it comes under 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. if you're in the eastern or central time zones it is (202) 748-8000. if you're in the mountain or pacific time zones, (202) 748-8001. that's the number to join the conversation. we will take this until 10 am eastern. page five of your book, you write this. that wiretapping was once a business, as supreme court justice all over wendell holmes jr. famously characterized it more than 90 years ago. now, it's a standard investigative tactic, indispensable 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? >> it takes a whole book to explain it. but this is the central story

about the book tells, how it is that wiretapping goes from a tactic that's associated with criminals, conman, 30, unethical characters, too unacceptable, legally unacceptable if controversial tactic used in the detection of, crime protection of national security and detection of crime. the central transition and that story from dirty business too 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 uprising's of 1966 and 1967 that the government is able to finally get in on the act, legally speaking. even though of course they've

been doing it for much longer. 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 anti-terrorism priorities. but instead a gradual accommodation, too much more subtle and problematic sets of law enforcement imperatives. that i believe are critical to the rise of our carceral society. >> going back to it being a dirty business, we talked about dc williams, the first person convicted of wire tapping. but wiretapping, a tactic used in the civil war for military purposes. something that federal troops and confederate troops both participated in.

why was it considered a dirty business at the beginning? >> wiretapping begins as a military art. the civil war is the first conflict in world history in which the use of electronic communications proves instrumental on the battlefield. both sides, union and the confederacy, develop wiretapping techniques to listen in on the enemies conversations, so to speak. the tactic of wiretapping receives fawning national news coverage during the conflict, throughout the conflict. indeed both in the united states and across the atlantic, as i discovered. but very quickly after the war, it falls into distrust be as a result of characters like dc williams. the government and law enforcement had very little interest or even need to tap telegraph 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 companies filing cabinet that it is to actually sit on the line and listen to moore's code. that means that wiretapping grows up in the late 19th century as the nation's dependence an electronic communication grows, in the hands of criminals and conman. there is a real powerful association in this period, really up until the 1920s and 1930s, between wiretapping and the criminal element. this is why i, setting aside long-standing concerns about privacy rights, this is why law enforcement has such trouble establishing its wiretap authority in the early decades of the 20th century. >> so, what happened in the 20s and 30s?

we're talking gangster, era al capote, elliott ness. >> prohibition era, wiretapping, this is where the rubber meets the road in history, this is really where law enforcement in earnest gets in on the act. the date we can point to as a landmark in this history is 19, 28 that's when the supreme court handed down a landmark decision in fourth amid jurisprudence known as halmstad versus the united states, that deems wiretapping constitutional according to the fourth and fifth amendments. this comes the prohibition bureau and law enforcement more generally the greenlight to wiretap it in the open, although they had been performing wiretaps, conducting electronic surveillance operations, for decades under the radar. as a result of the great areas in the law, it's really that prohibition experiment that brings wire tapping into the mainstream domain of law

enforcement. but even then, it takes another four decades, from 1928 to 1968, for the government to finally establish its wiretap authority and finally establish the system of wiretap oversight that is still very much in place today. >> a history of wiretapping in the united states, that is the subtitle of the book, the listeners. i brian hochman, professor at georgetown university is the author and joining us. let me pause here and bring in some colors on this topic. anthony miller from new york, good morning, you're on with professor hochman. >> thank you professor for joining us, thank you to the moderator as well. perhaps you can both answer my question, if not today than it's a future segment says he's been would air. it's troubled me greatly ever since barack obama came into office, he was able to wipe clean a lawsuit that had been pending, believe it was hepa dig versus at&t and the nsa.

the thought police have been a well oiled machine in this governmental apparatus since the beginning of time, they've only perfected it. when you consider the fact that mark kline was a whistleblower who came forward and exposed what the nsa had been doing by illegally wiretapping, they had set up a big brother machine, what they referred to it as. whereby they were allowed to go through everything you do. every keystroke, every phone conversation. it's hard for us as regular people to know exactly how sophisticated the technologies have evolved. but barack obama's for a signing statement as president was to dismantle that lawsuit, 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. i wonder, was that legal? i don't believe that it was.

when you weigh that into the cambridge analytic a scandal, what is going on with spying on our own presidents. you had general milley calling a chinese general and telling him, don't worry, this virus -- whatever. it seems to me that -- tyranny -- >>, anthony let me pause there and get professor hochman to chat about that a little bit. i don't know if you're familiar with that specific case, but the nsa in general? >> i'm not familiar with this specific case the color of first 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 an american political culture. this is the kind of position against electronic surveillance

conducted either via 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 is also referring to, i believe, at&t's listening room. room 606 or 6:12, in the fulsome street at&t switching station and san francisco. this was discovered in, i believe, 2006 or 2007 as a result of a whistleblower. that exposed at&t's practice of kind of enabling the government, the nsa and other agencies, to listen to private conversations through backdoor channels and the internet and

telecommunications infrastructures. this too has a long history as well, as early as 1895 the new york telephone company is leasing lines to the new york police department, the nypd. so, the relationship between telecommunications, companies, telecommunications industry more generally and law enforcement imperatives, this is long in the making. i don't think we could see the last ten, 15 years of history accurately unless we see the hundred years, 120 years, that preceded it. >> a quote from your book that jumped out. the american ideal of electronic privacy as never existed in practice. >> so, this is a provocation. i mean two things when i say the privacy has never existed in practice when we think about

communications privacy. the first is that wiretapping and electronic surveillance, historically speaking, technologically speaking, have been historically coextensive with the rise of electronic communications. there's no such thing as electronic communications without electronic eavesdropping. what it is that we mean when we talk about electronic privacy it is somewhat fraught, i would say, as a result. but that is a somewhat grim story and the other side of that same coin, this is the second thing i'm referring to when i say privacy has never existed in practice, is that privacy has animated political constituencies to work successfully against the intrusions of government and technology for about 150 years.

when i say privacy has never existed in practice, i'm also trying to capture something of this lost sense of political commitment that animated so much of american political culture up until the 1960s, and dissipates after the triumph of the law and order coalition in the late 1960s. >> we'll head up to michigan, this is allen waiting. allen, good morning. >> good morning. as far as this patriot act, if we go back in time now. but coal got blown up in 18, we had our pants down and we didn't do anything about it. then two years later we've got the stinking patriot act, that's a heck of a name. i hope the top secret criminalized work with admirals, navy. the world you're talking about,

although i was 40, perfect for us, don't have respect for the civilian world, sir. let's go to those pfizer warrants. went papadopoulos and carter actually spied on, as barr said? they were spied on. they've about ruined trump in every way that they can, and it still continues to this day. trump, hasn't he been the most scrutinized, spied on man in the history of man? >> asking a couple questions there. >> i think that history has yet to be written. i think we will know a lot more as time unfolds. there is a lot in that comment.

i think, one responds to offer, i immediate response, is to suggest the story of wiretapping in america isn't simply a story about government, , spying on politicians, private citizens. it's also a much more prosaic story, much more mundane story. one of the things i was shocked to discover in researching this book was just how prolific wiretapping was in the private sector up until the 1960s and 1970s in the united states. far more lines were tapped interest diction's like new york in the 19 50s to litigate civil disputes and divorce cases then there were to spy on communist subversives or even bringing down mafioso and the

like. there's a tangled history that is behind that reality, behind the numbers. but it suggests that the story of wiretap and goes in directions that i think popular understanding and popular memory today might not necessarily expect, might not necessarily be familiar with. part of the work of my book is to uncover that story, which i believe is a true area story of -- trevor story in the sense of the historical record, also in the 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 columns of the 19th century newspaper. and i was shocked to discover

that wiretapping went back so far. i'm a historian of technology, a cultural historian of the united states, and i should have known better. i wanted to understand, one, the reality of that history, how far it goes back. and to, why it is, that as an educated american, i would think of wiretapping and electronic surveillance more generally as more modern and more contemporary phenomena. 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 has been done and legal scholarship surrounding the history of the fourth amendment, surrounding fourth amendment law, electronic surveillance law, wiretap law. but outside of the domain of law, in the domain of policy, in the domain of culture, and the domain of technology, that

story hadn't really been told. and i had to be the one to tell it. >> sticking to the domain of culture, how is wiretapping, how is bugging, eavesdropping, how has it been portrayed in our media specifically cinema, throughout the decades? >> this was a very important story for me to follow. contrary to our understanding of electronic, surveillance particularly government, surveillance pointing here at the capitol building behind you. contrary to that image of wiretapping as the province merely as a shadowy surveillance tape it goes on behind closed doors, in the realm of shadowy government secrets, wiretapping has been a perennial point of cultural fascination. dating back to the 19th century.

one of the cultural documents that i was thrilled to uncover as i was working through the sources was a kind of spate of pulp novels, tremendously popular thrillers produced in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, called wire thrillers. these were detective novels that followed the exploits of wiretap or's, telegraphed hampers on both sides of the law. almost always in the genre of the wire thriller, wiretapping was depicted as eight, cd, disreputable and even dishonourable activity. i wanted to recover something of that attitude by looking at those sources. fast forward a century, to hbo celebrated series, the wire.

in which wiretapping is mostly depicted as the good way to wage the war on drugs. not always effective but certainly better than knocking heads on street corners utah. i find those two historical touchstones illuminating. wiretapping at the turn of the 20th century as dirty, dishonourable, disreputable. and wiretapping at the turn of the 21st as something that good police to. how it is that that transition takes place is much of the story the book tells. >> i've seen from the wire, tampers illustration from that 1906 novel. with the quote quiet, motionless bent over the woman they're listening to a telegraph tap. that's the picture from that 1906 novel. we are talking with brian hochman, who wrote the book the

listeners on the history of wiretap of the united states, and take your phone calls. just after 9:30 on the east coast. a reminder, at 10 am eastern we will end this program, the house is expected to have a brief proforma session this morning. so, that's where we may be going if they are in at that time. but go ahead and keep calling in online, split regionally. (202) 748-8000 if you're in the eastern or central time zone. (202) 748-8001 if you're in the mountain or pacific time zone. this is sean in the mountain time zone, colorado. good morning. >> yes, good morning. i've a question for the gentlemen, i guess he didn't answer for the last person. but one obama and clyburn can spy on the presidential campaign and biden, that biden can rated presidential house, now we have darkened berg going out to say the fbi is involved in telling him they buried the biden story, isn't this absolute corruption? bob all the departments in that

little cuba behind you need to be shut down, this is absolute corruption. thank you. >> sean and colorado. the intersection of presidents and wiretapping, the history there. >> sure. unfortunately, i can't speak to these questions with any kind of authority, my book is a history, it stops, generally speaking, in 2001. of course, it came out before these recent revelations. what i can say and what we know for now is that wiretapping, when conducted by the federal government or by municipal or state law enforcement, is conducted under a rigorous set of judicial safeguards. so, i think we'll find out more

about how the current controversies came to be. but generally speaking, when wires are tapped, they are done above board. 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 three of that law is the wiretap act. and a 1978 with the foreign intelligence surveillance act. these are pretty much followed to the letter of the law for better or for worse. >> it book is a history of wiretapping in the united states, how would that history be different if it was looking at other countries around the world? >> so, that's a really great question. i invite other scholars and historians >> to write about it? >> yeah, there's only so many wiretaps that one can follow. the american story looks

different from, obviously, the story of wiretapping and electronic surveillance in totalitarian governments. countries like russia and the age of the soviet union, east germany and the age of 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 similar legal regimes, 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 is because it happened here first. the techniques of technical surveillance that we, that would become wiretapping and

bugging, were pioneered in the united states context. secondly, there is a far more robust, i think, tradition of civil liberties and civil rights activism in the united states. that has shaped that history that i've traced. it's one reason why it took so long to pass a federal wiretap law in the united states in 1968, it took a century. whereas in canada, it took a couple years, and the united kingdom took less than that. it's because most americans didn't like wiretapping. they believed it was a dirty business and that political consensus won the day for that better part of a century. it's one reason why our story is different from the story of other nations, because ordinary americans pushed back.

>> sumter, south carolina, this is audrey. good morning. >> good morning, john. i wanted to ask the guest question, if i may, please? brian, well you recapping the civil rights era, how that came about, what did you learn about it? thank you, look forward to the answer off the air. >> thank you for the, question this is an important story that the book follows. the caller is referring to the fbi's surveillance activities in the 1950s and 1960s in particular. harassing and surveilling civil rights leaders. martin luther king most especially, also elijah muhammad, malcolm x, sticky carmichael and many others. this is a really important story that the book follows,

but also i want to follow another story that is happening alongside it. which is had a triumph of a kind of law and order style of politics, which is essentially racialized politics, winds out in the 1960s as a result of the civil rights revolution. essentially empowers law enforcement to wiretap a far less visible sector of the american public, that's communities of color who are on the front lines of what would become known as the war on drugs. so, while the book traces that history of, say, martin luther king and it also traces the history of the martin luther king recordings whichever made 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 on drugs. by the numbers, upwards of 80 to 90% of fires that are tapped in this country in any given year are done for that specific purpose. to wage the war on drugs. and communities of color are at the front lines of that conflict. >> why are those martin leader cain recording still under seal, more than 50 years later? >> this is a really interesting and crazy story. the story of martin luther king being bugged by hoover's fbi is well-known, and it was in fact well-known during king's own life and was a part of the public record shortly following his death. the recordings themselves were

put under seal as a result of the church committee investigations of the federal intelligence community in the 1970s. and have remained under seal ever since. politicians on the right to have attempted to unseal those recordings overtime, mostly in efforts to tarnish king's legacy, tarnishes name. most famously in the run up to congress's passage of martin luther king day as a federal holiday. jesse helms, a notorious aggregation senator from north carolina. tried to unseal those documents and was rebuffed. generations of politicians and also historians have tried to get at their contents through creative means. it will be unsealed in 2027, and we'll have to see what happens then. >> heading to jeff in dearborn,

michigan. good morning, you are next. jeff, you with us, sir? >> -- what a rate listening device is, and what dirt boxing is? >> we can take those up. a sting ray listening device? >> i don't know what a dirt box is. a sting ray is essentially a fake cell phone tower. also known as and i am yes i catcher. that is what is a device that was developed on the private market in the 19 80s and 1990s, and has become a favored tool of law enforcement awe in the 21st century. the use of the sting ray has grown up in the gray areas of

the law for quite some time. it's unclear whether it's illegal to use a sting ray or, not it can be used in certain jurisdictions, can't in others, but as cropped up in recent years in i.c.e. investigations, in detroit, in drug investigations in baltimore, 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 that legal for a lot enforcement to wiretap if it's not necessarily permissible to use the fruits

of that wiretap in a court of law? it's illegal to tap a telephone in a state for the feds, so to speak, to tap a telephone in a state where wiretapping is prohibited? these are all 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. the use of the sting ray, just like the use of federal facial recognition technologies today, operates in similar legal gray areas. we will see how those questions get resolved as time unfolds. >> memories entangled legal question, what was operation root canal? >> operation root canal was an effort by the fbi in the 1990s to, as essentially, build a

back door into the nations evolving communications infrastructure. starting in the 19 80s, with the breakup of the bell system and that technological revolution in communications that ensued. the birth of mobile phones, pagers, facts machines, especially the revolution in fiber optic communications. ultimately, then digital networks. this caused pandas problems for law enforcement, they could necessarily wiretap lines in the way that they had. in order to 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, essentially. the communications industry pushes back notably in the name of privacy, also in the name of profit. ultimately, this leads to the passage of a landmark law, often forgotten today, in 1994 known as the communications assistance for lot enforcement act. this is a law that requires communications companies to build surveillance capacities into their new technologies. the internet, which was then a nascent communications environment, wasn't covered under scalia. but telephone communications, other forms of data exchanges were. this was the first time that the government essentially goes on record requiring innovations

to be surveillance ready. this is the result of this backdoor campaign on the part of the fbi, that they called operation root canal, quite amusingly in my opinion. >> port river, new jersey. this is cheri next. good morning. >> good morning. since trump isn't in office anymore, and it's common haulage that the fbi tapped the white house, i was wondering how many other presidents have the fbi tapped and the white house while they were president? and there are other presidents that the fbi has fired on besides trump? or is trump the only one day of tapped on? what other presidents -- >> got your question, sherry. >> we should note that the white house itself was not wiretapped, as far as we know. we should also note that any wires that were tapped in the

trump administration were done under title three oversight. other presidents, most famously richard nixon of course, recorded their own conversations. so did lyndon johnson. nixon himself, of course, it's well known for weaponizing the use of the fbi and its surveillance capacities. so, there is a great deal of president here as well. i'm not sure if that exactly answers the question but, starting with johnson, presidents often recorded their conversations via telephone. nixon himself, as the color probably knows, recorded his own exchanges in the oval office for a variety of reasons. we're not necessarily an unprecedented territory. >> you called the book a

personal wiretap, when somebody can have a device that records themselves. you talk about nixon in the white house. what about google homes and elect those that people have in their own homes? and the questions those have raised a bit wiretapping? >> so, as i mentioned, the google home and amazon alexa, these are not technically wiretaps. but they are listening devices and it's well known that they listened to ambient noise, ambient conversations passively, even when you are not addressing them. this is an emerging area of research. one of the things i find so fascinating about the widespread use of alexa and like technologies is just how normal there are and just how many americans, by far the majority, kind of resigned themselves today to be

implication that their conversations may be monitored in one form or another. and it may actually be in their interest as consumers to have their data monitored. you're going to get better advertisements, better deals. also, it's just a sort of gateway problem that we all have to accommodate ourselves to when we turn on our phones or go on the internet. we know that our location is going to be tracked, we know that 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, just away our communication environment works. that's one of the stories that the book tells. but, yes this is an emerging area of research. and the amazon alike so that you have in your home, it is listening. >> with about ten minutes left this morning with brian hochman, you can go ahead and keep calling in. but in your book, you mentioned that every generation has a wiretapping scandal. what are some of the most interesting to you, that we haven't gotten to yet? >> so, every generation seems to uncover wiretapping a new, with fresh outrage. about a decade or so, there's a kind of cycle of resignation and a ridge. the earliest national scandal

pertaining to wiretapping in the united states happens in new york city in 1916, this is a very interesting and complicated affair that involves multiple entities. but at the rate 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. 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 was a national scandal, it hit the headlines of every major newspaper across the

states in 1916 and 17, what it was that john mitchell's office for doing. these catholic priests who had their telephone conversations tapped and burns, big this private detective at the center of it, in questionable ways. what's interesting about that scandal is that all the major players involved escaped unscathed and burns, at the center of the controversy, later became the first head of the bureau of investigation that would become the fbi so, wiretapping works in interesting ways i have found the. these generational scandals were surprising to me to uncover, all kinds of interesting stories to follow that i detail in the book. and that would be right for

further research as well. >> the book, again the listeners, and 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 they'll be able to read your thoughts on the future? is there going to be brain wiretapping and we will be responsible, criminally, for your thoughts that are negative? also, what makes it a crime to have thoughts or talk to somebody 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? we continue to say everyone's a conspirator and put them in

prison without committing a crime? the story of the government or end of shadowy corporate entities are private citizens having the ability to wiretap the brain, as the caller says. this is a very old story. in the 1960s, mainstream politicians were warning of the thought police, big brother, and the government's capacity to listen in. using all manner of st innovations, such as the buck, among others. the future is hard to say. i don't ever think it's going to go that far. but i think there are some very interesting technologies that are in place today that we should think about as part of

our future, and part of the future of privacy in technology in america. most important, device that i have been thinking about, practice that i've been thinking, about technology i've been thinking about, one that resembles the history of wiretapping to a great degree is the use of facial recognition technologies, particularly by law enforcement. this is a practice that is 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 if history is any pretext, we are going to be having these debates for quite a long time to come, which is why it is important to know where we came from. >> akron, ohio, this is at. good morning. >> yes.

thank you for taking my call. my question is, you said wiretapping had such a hard time getting hold in the united states as opposed to other countries is because the american citizens were so much against it. do you believe that that is possibly still the case, that the majority of america would rather not be wiretapped? or that it's against her civil rights to listen to her private conversations? and that the federal government just don't care and they do what they want to do in the name of, get the drug dealers, because if you make anything so terrible that it doesn't matter what we do to go after around, then it's okay to do it because they're so terrible. that's all i got. thanks. >> this is a great question. i think now all americans would

be horrified if their line was tapped, one way or another. but interesting, lee all of the current social science research suggests that digital resignation, surveillance resignation, has really eroded our sense of privacy. and the vast majority of americans, have accommodated themselves to monitoring of their data, their communications in one form or another. what i think that means this thought, fighting back against the encouragements of technology today is something of an uphill battle, much more of an uphill battle than it was even as late as 1966, 1967.

far more americans, in those days, had a mainstream earnest commitment to privacy. and congress, in washington, in the name of civil liberties, and the name of civil rights, also made good on those popular beliefs and that kind of mainstream sense that privacy is central to american political life. again, today, that is not so much the case. not only have we resigned ourselves to our data being monitored by corporate firms, i social media companies, and the like, but also we regard wiretapping, law enforcement surveillance like goes on in the name of enforcement priorities such as the war on drugs as essentially good

police work. there really has been an erosion overtime. well i think it's true, and all the colors would probably agree, if we had our own telephones tapped, we would probably be horrified. but at the same time, all of the research suggests that we've resigned ourselves to this reality. that i think makes the future pretty cloudy for the ordinary american citizen. >> as we wait for the house to come in, get a quick proforma session this morning, we'll take you there when they do, an interesting question from dark canyon on twitter, but you can also take it historically as well. asking, does the government assume that all an encrypted traffic is public information and therefore fair game for surveillance? specifically the internet traffic? this is a question can be asked time and again throughout american history. >> it does and it doesn't.

it depends on what kind of traffic, what platform you are using, the legal protocols and regulations are byzantine and numerous. generally speaking however, the government has won rules that we can say that holds ground in the history of wiretapping and electronic surveillance in america. from the 19th century to the present. the government is much more interested in data and communications that are at rest, as opposed to data and communications that are in motion, life. it's just easier to get a hold of stored communications than it is to actually sit on a wire, or tap a telephone, in the 1940s, 1950s, historic

communications are much different, and legally speaking it is easier for law enforcement to acquire those stored communications that it is to actually sit on a telephone line. those relationships are changing slightly as a result of a series of landmark supreme court cases in the mid 2010s, but that rule still holes. >> for a lot more on the history of wiretapping in the united states, the book is the listeners, the author is brian hochman, a professor at georgetown university, on twitter it's -- win appreciate your time this morning. >> thanks so much for having me.