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Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni)
TrailerAntonioni’s iconic film isn’t about privacy per se, but about two troubling aspects of what will become “the surveillance society”: voyeurism and the use of surveillance information to create narratives – some accurate, some wholly erroneous. Those themes, like Antonioni’s distanced, modernist style, will be major influences on The Conversation. -
Alan Westin, Privacy and Freedom
Westin’s seminal treatise defines privacy as “the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated.” Westin’s research would influence privacy policy for decades to come. -
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The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan)
Patrick McGoohan’s British television series, The Prisoner, debuts on September 29, 1967, running for only 17 episodes. Nevertheless, this dark allegory of an English spy trapped in an extensively-monitored society achieved cult status, perfectly evoking the era’s anxiety over surveillance, technology, and political power -
Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347
Justice Harlan’s majority opinion identifies privacy as the value protected by the Fourth Amendment, extending that protection to “people, not places.” Nonetheless, it is the Harlan concurrence that ultimately determines what the Constitution protects: the individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” -
The Secret Cinema: A Paranoid Fantasy (Paul Bartel)
Actor/cult director Bartel’s 30-minute short predicts the logical outcome of the Surveillance Society – and anticipates Big Brother (2000) by decades. The daily trials of Jane, a NYC secretary, are taped surreptitiously and shown in theaters – becoming a media sensation -- without her knowledge. Even Jane’s mom and closest friends cooperate in securing the footage, Bartel’s comment on a society that has come to value looking more than loyalty -
Title III--The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968
Although Title III (the Wiretapping Act) ostensibly marks Congressional attempt to ensure compliance with Katz, debate ensues over “strategic surveillance” in cases of national security and organized crime. President Johnson signs the Act but expresses the reservation that holes in the legislation will produce “a nation of snoopers . . . . No conversation in the sanctity of the bedroom or relayed over a copper telephone wire would be free of eavesdropping by those who say they want to ferret ou -
Christopher Pyle, “CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics,” Washington Monthly
Pyle, a former instructor at the U.S. Army Intelligence School, shocks the nation with revelations that the Army’s domestic intelligence program employs 1500 undercover agents, using 300 offices nationwide to collect data on members of the Civil Rights and anti-War Movements. An even greater threat to constitutional liberties looms, Pyle warns, as technology marries a virtually-unlimited defense budget. -
Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma)
TrailerA disaffected Vietnam Vet (Robert DeNiro) uses high-tech camera equipment to record the lives of neighbors in a high-rise apartment building. Known for his quotations of Hitchcock – here, of Rear Window (1954) – De Palma creates a time capsule of the Surveillance Society’s juxtapositions: watching versus being watched, public versus private, and performance versus genuine political engagement. -
The Huston Plan
Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston submits a plan to unify the directors of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NSA in the “interagency Committee on Intelligence.” Heretofore competitive agencies will join in an unprecedented program of illegal wiretaps, burglary, mail tampering, and surveillance targeting anti-War activists and Nixon critics. Author James Reston will call Huston’s proposal” the most anti-democratic document in American history.” The plan dies when J. Edgar Hoover rejects -
Privacy, Nomos XIII: Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
Featuring analyses by scholars whose work spans the culture -- law, anthropology, political theory, psychiatry, philosophy, and sociology – Nomos XIII introduces a conclusive explanation of Americans’ expectations of privacy. Each of thirteen essays addresses one aspect of privacy – its origins, nature, history, or political context -- but all extol privacy as the source of individualism, thus “an ultimate good, desirable for its own sake.” Editor John Chapman concludes with a warning: the great -
Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights
Fearful that the Army’s databank on civilian activists represents “part of a vast network,” Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) initiates hearings to investigate the newest threat to civil liberties: computerized intelligence. AG John Mitchell stonewalls, arguing that the President may collect and store data without legal restriction through his “inherent power to protect the internal security of the nation.” Commenting on the computer’s potential power to reduce the constitution to the size of a pinhead, -
THX-1138 (George Lucas)
TrailerWith financing from Francis Ford Coppola and creative input from Walter Murch, novice filmmaker Lucas uses new BART stations to create a society in which everything -- heart rate, sexual activity, job performance – is monitored. Audiences find Lucas’s dystopia -- where work and consumption dictate meaning, and technology dictates intimacy -- wildly futuristic. -
COINTELPRO Exposed
Activists break into an FBI Office in Media, Pennsylvania, hoping to establish the “nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on” against anti-War activists. They strike the mother lode: the stolen documents reveal an organized program of wiretapping, bugging, mail-tampering, blackmail, entrapment, and police harassment aimed at the entirety of the American Left. Mainstream newspapers refuse to go public with the burglars’ data, but in 1976, the Church Committee exposes in COINT -
United States v. White, 401 U.S. 745
White’s claim that he has a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when conversing with an associate -- albeit a wire-wearing informant -- fails before a divided Court. The controversy produces a four-vote plurality, and six opinions, among them Justice Douglas’s iconic dissent: “Electronic surveillance is the greatest leveler of human privacy ever known.” -
The Hon. Shirley Hufstedler, “The Directions and Misdirections of a Constitutional Right of Privacy"
The Ninth Circuit trailblazer tells the NY City Bar: “no corner of privacy is more unkempt than that tended by the [U.S.] Supreme Court.” Hufstedler then identifies a constitutional right to informational privacy -- not in inferences or prenumbra, but in the explicit “guaranty that people shall be ‘secure in their persons.’” Decades before Matt Drudge, Hufstedler warns against “snoopers and probers [who] can capture our very essence for instant transmission or for release at a more convenient -
The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet)
TrailerLumet depicts as fiction the ubiquitous government surveillance that Watergate will establish as real. A sophisticated burglar (Sean Connery) plans a heist, unaware that a half-dozen investigators and agencies – each unknown to the other – monitor has every move. When a private citizen reports the burglary, the discombobulated agencies must destroy their surveillance records to avoid exposure as spies and incompetents. -
Arthur R. Miller, The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Databanks, and Dossiers
Miller warns that technology’s principal threat to privacy lies in the collection, storage, manipulation, and dissemination of information by agencies geared to perceive nothing “but the intrinsic value of data” and predisposed to “stop at nothing” in obtaining it. As presciently, Miller foresees the attitude that will give rise to Facebook: the “vast majority of us passively and voluntarily -- often eagerly —respond[ing] fully to” the data-aggregators. Excerpt: link to Miller on our cite. -
Samuel Alito, Report on the Conference on the Boundaries of Privacy in American Society
ReportChair of the Conference Committee, Princeton undergrad Sam Alito joins in the Conference’s unanimous finding that “privacy is too often sacrificed to other values; [and that] action must be taken on many fronts to preserve privacy.” The Conference recommends radical limitations on the government’s domestic surveillance capabilities, a position likely to surprise later students of Alito’s career -
United States v. U.S. District Court (the Keith case), 407 U.S. 297
The FBI uses unauthorized wiretaps to identify activists who damaged government property but refuses to use or release the information obtained in the ensuing prosecution. The Supreme Court unanimously affirms Judge Damon Keith’s order releasing the data, effectively banning warrantless domestic wiretaps. In concurrence Justice Douglas explains a growing constitutional threat: given that “intelligence-only” surveillance will never be used in court, the government’s conduct will never be judicial -
Laird v. Tatum, 498 U.S. 1 (1972)
Activist Tatum alleges that the Army’s vast surveillance program impedes First Amendment rights. The Army doesn’t deny the surveillance, but counters that the mere creation and maintenance of the database has resulted in no harm. The closely divided (5-4) court concludes Tatum’s claim is not ripe. Justice Rehnquist, newly-appointed, casts the decisive vote, having refused to recuse himself even though, as an Asst. AG, he gave Senate testimony endorsing the program. -
An American Family (Craig Gilbert)
Record numbers of viewers become hooked on the activities of the Louds, middle class Californians who submit to seven months of filmed surveillance. Content proves even more revolutionary than format: with camera running, wife/mother Pat Loud asks for a divorce, and son Lance reveals he is gay. It is television’s first hint that family life isn’t exactly as Father Knows Best has suggested. -
The Senate Watergate Committee
The Sam Ervin (D-NC)-led committee will focus on illegalities ordered by the President, his staff, and his campaign committee, targeting the Administration’s assaults on the security of political opponents. Nonetheless, the chief casualty of Administration surveillance will be the President himself: when tape-recordings of Oval Office conversations reveal his complicity in impeachable offenses, the President resigns. -
CIA Internal Review of Illegal Domestic Surveillance (the “Family Jewels”)
ReportNew CIA director James Schlesinger orders an internal review of CIA activities. The results shock even Schlesinger: hundreds of reports describe Operation Chaos, a vast domestic surveillance program aimed at activists, journalists, and critics of the Nixon Administration. Dubbed the “family jewels,” the reports will lead to Seymour Hersh’s ground-breaking New York Times report and the formation of the era’s historic investigative committees -
Anthony Amsterdam. “Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment”
Amsterdam’s lecture series exposes him as no fan of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard, which he believes has undermined the spirit of Katz: if the Fourth Amendment is defined either by the nature of government “intrusion” or by the individual’s “expectation,” technology will inevitably eradicate all constitutional protection. Memorably, Amsterdam asks “how tightly the amendment permits people to be driven back into the recesses of their lives by the risk of surveillance.” -
Seymour Hersh "Huge C.I.A. Operation [Against] Dissidents . . . ,” The New York Times
ArticleHersh reveals the scope of the CIA’s illegal surveillance program – dossiers on 10,000 Americans – and the intelligence-community divisions that produced it. Nonetheless, the press greets Hersh’s expose with hostility and skepticism. The criticism will prove ill-founded when the Church Commission confirms Hersh’s claims. “Hersh, and Hersh alone,” a historian will write, “caused the President, and then Congress . . . to make intelligence a major issue in 1975.” -
The President’s Commission on CIA Activities (The Rockefeller Commission)
White House aide Dick Cheney urges President Ford to create his own panel to investigate the CIA’s domestic surveillance scandal. The “damage control” fails: the “blue ribbon” panel will come to be seen as a “whitewash,” criticized as having suppressed evidence, restricted its inquiry, and avoided meaningful recommendations for reform. Two reputations survive the public relations debacle, those of -
Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a)
The Act reflects growing Congressional awareness of computerized data as a threat to civil liberties. Collecting government agencies must make it known that they maintain databases, may not release stored information without permission from the subjects described in the data, and must allow subjects to correct errors in their records. Exceptions – for law enforcement, administrative agencies, congressional investigations, etc. – seem likely to swallow the rule. -
The Church Committee (Senate Select Committee to Study . . . Intelligence Activities)
The investigative body chaired by Frank Church (D-Id) interviews 800 witnesses over nine months. The Senators release secret documents, grill top spies, and provoke unrelenting criticism from conservatives who argue that the hearings breach national security. Church’s response refers to the Committee’s discovery of another national threat -- the government’s emerging technological power to monitor all electronic messages, a capacity that “at any time could be turned on the American people. . . . -
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison
Foucault’s revolutionary treatise exposes the drive for power that underlies surveillance: observation produces knowledge which is then used to constrain or dictate the behavior of others. Notably, Foucault resurrects the Panopticon, the prison structure devised by Jeremy Bentham to ensure good behavior by convincing each inmate that he is under constant surveillance. Two decades after his death, privacy advocates will recognize Foucault’s Panopticon-produced “docile bodies” among CCTV-monitored -
Judith Jarvis Thomson, Thomas Scanlon, and James Rachels in Philosophy and Public Affairs
This quarterly’s “privacy edition” produces a diversity of viewpoints. Rachels finds privacy’s value in its structuring of interpersonal relationships. Scanlon focuses on society’s creation of a “zone of privacy immune from specified intrusions.” MIT’s Thomson is predictably controversial: privacy is not a right but a derivative of other rights protecting property and bodily security. Reaching beyond academe, the essays will be so often cited that they become foundational in Americans’ understa -
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man
Sennett’s analysis of the cultural preoccupation with privacy offers a revolutionary departure from conventional writing: the over-valuation of the private has led to increasing narcissism and self-absorption. Sennett predicts a nation of passive by-standers, unable to challenge society’s great problems in the belief that to do so will be “at the expense of developing ourselves.” Constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen ultimately will name Fall one of the five best books ever written about priva -
Jeffrey A. Reiman, Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood, Philosophy and Public Affairs
Reiman’s progressive political theory fuels his criticism of other definitions of privacy as well as informing his own articulation of the evolving concept. Specifically faulting Fried and Rachels for interpretations that would make the right dependent on relationships, Reiman declares privacy coextensive with the human capacity for intimacy: “The right to privacy, then, protects the individual's interest in becoming, being, and remaining a person.” -
Charles Fried, Privacy, 77 Yale Law Journal 475
Fried breaks from academic convention to locate foundation of privacy, not in constitutional theory, but in “the reasons why mean men feel that invasions of that right injure them in their very humanity.” The resulting article marks the beginning of Fried’s life-long investigation of the extent to which law, morality, and ethical conduct intersect. -
Richard Posner, ‘The Right of Privacy,” 12 Georgia Law Review 393
Posner’s lecture reflects what will be lifelong skepticism of the right to privacy: people do not want “to be let alone,” but to manipulate the world around them by withholding information. Posner analyzes in economic terms our reciprocal desires to obtain or to withhold personal facts, concluding that society’s best interests lie in disclosure. Three decades later, Posner will provoke privacy advocates anew, writing in the New York Daily News: “There is a tendency to exaggerate the social value -
The Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act of 1978
The product of Church Committee revelations of CIA malfeasance, FISA embodies a compromise, balancing civil libertarians’ privacy concerns against conservative endorsement of national security interests. The result will please no one. Critics on the right will denounce the Act’s limitations—which require identification of targets and restrict surveillance to “foreign governments or their agents” – as inadequate to predict threats. Progressives will condemn a secret court whose unpublished decisi