海角论坛

April 26, 2016鈥斺�淲hat if we never had wiretapping?鈥�

If you were asked to date that quote, chances are you鈥檇 place it in the last five years or so鈥攁nd in this case, you鈥檇 be right. That鈥檚 Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, responding to a question on the FBI-Apple encryption controversy during a March 2016 on the popular internet forum Reddit.

But questions about wiretapping date back much further than the public debate raging right now, and Georgetown 海角论坛 professor is working to chronicle its largely forgotten history.

Hochman has been awarded a from the to conduct research at the AT&T Archives and Records Center in New Jersey for his next book, tentatively titled聽All Ears: A History of Wiretapping in the United States.

Hochman is assistant professor of and a core faculty member of the聽 and programs. His newest book project builds on his academic interest in 鈥渢he texts and technologies that have shaped American cultural history since the mid-nineteenth century.鈥澛�All Ears聽will be a history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States from 1850s to the near-present.

鈥淲e talk about it as a new phenomenon, but wiretapping has been around as long as the wires,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he earliest state law against wiretapping was written in 1862, which means that telegraph tapping was common in some parts of the country.聽Civil War generals even brought professional wiretappers with them on military campaigns.鈥�

Hochman aims to combine a definitive history of eavesdropping technologies鈥攁nd the laws passed in attempts to control them鈥攚ith a cultural study of the way Americans have 鈥渃ome to understand our communications as porous.鈥�

He plans to use his time in the AT&T Archives to study the 1920s. 鈥淲iretapping became understood as a national problem during the Prohibition era,鈥� he explained. 鈥淟istening to and recording phone conversations was the primary tool that state and federal law enforcement agencies used to combat organized crime and bootlegging syndicates.鈥�

According to Hochman,聽many Prohibition-era wiretapping cases feature examples of some of the same ethical issues that continue to vex policymakers today.

鈥淟aw enforcement wiretapping was pervasive in the 1920s and early 1930s,鈥� Hochman said. 鈥淏ut in some cases, it turns out that the easiest way for police to listen to phone conversations wasn鈥檛 to tap a wire, it was to listen in through the Bell telephone system central exchange. So it involved a state-corporate partnership鈥攍aw enforcement was in cahoots with corporations. When we talk about the NSA聽partnering with Facebook or Verizon, et cetera, today, we think it鈥檚 new and unprecedented, but these partnerships actually have a long history.”

The misconception about the novelty of electronic eavesdropping is perhaps the biggest myth that Hochman hopes to debunk in All Ears.

鈥淎 lot of our public discussions about communications and privacy rest on this false sense of nostalgia about a time without eavesdropping. Every 15 years, going back to the 1860s, America rediscovers this problem. But there really are no electronic communications without wiretapping鈥攖hey coexist.鈥�

Related Information

Brian Hochman is the author of (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). He discusses some of the ideas he鈥檒l explore in All Ears in the February 2016 Post45 article,

For news and updates, follow Professor Hochman on Twitter: .