3. The Pressures Generated by Abundance
It may seem odd that affluence should undermine privacy, but it clearly has. There is evidence that much of the great increase in surveillance, investigation, and intrusion into people’s privacy can be traced to conditions arising from abundance.
Consider the problem of launching and moving goods in today’s superabundant economy. Styles in products are changing swiftly. The lifetime of product types is becoming ever shorter. And, there is increasing strain to find significantly new products or variants. All these factors have produced a greater preoccupation with secrecy. A company concerned with secrecy in industry begins to wonder who can be trusted and brings in the undercover agents to check on employees.
This pressure to move goods affects individual privacy in another way. Companies have been turning to more relentless selling tactics to attract our attention. Privacy diminishes as the hawkers telephone us several times a week, or shove their feet in the door while posing as survey makers.
Affluence has produced a tremendous increase in the use of credit and in the sale of all sorts of insurance policies. The sellers of both credit and insurance feel that to survive they must investigate the lives of prospects. Every insurance policy, for example, is a risk, a bet. The companies try to hedge their bets on policies of substance by arranging for a quiet investigation of the insured’s finances and living habits. And so we have millions of insurance investigations, often accompanied by a “neighborhood check”—and the findings often reach files from which information is swapped or sold.
The growth in the amount of spare time that most Americans can enjoy has in at least one way made privacy more difficult to achieve for many of them. Americans have more time now to read newspapers, magazines, and books and to watch TV and listen to radio. They want not only to be informed but to be entertained and, often, titillated. Many enjoy gossip and scandalous facts about fellow citizens. And many of the mass media have relentlessly sought to provide them with a steady diet of gossipy information. The result of both the desire for such information and the media’s efforts to supply it has in effect produced a combined assault on privacy. The dual nature of this assault is pointed up by Morris Ernst and Alan Schwartz in their definitive legal analysis of privacy as it is affected by the media.1 At one point they note that the desire “of the mass media to make a profit at the expense of our privacy is a growing pressure.” And they ask: “How should the ever-increasing thirst of the public for news and information be balanced against the sometimes desperate desire for privacy on the part of the individual?”
Finally we might simply note sociologist Kingsley Davis’ observation that the explosive growth of both possessions and people “is causing an ever larger portion of our high level of living to be used to escape from the consequences of congestion.”
4. The Growth of Investigation as a Private Industry
There are now not only thousands of firms offering their services as investigators but also a large number of management-consultant firms that derive most of their income from screening, assessing, or observing employees. And there are quite a few hundred psychologists who are happy to reap the bounty paid for screening, probing, and assessing managerial aspirants. Finally, a great many firms are eager to keep a steady stream of subjects harnessed to their lie detector machines. An official of one of the nation’s larger investigative agencies told me with a grin: “A lot of money can be made with lie detectors.”
Many of these enterprises with a vested interest in anxiety among business managers work strenuously to keep reminding the nation’s industrialists of the untrustworthiness or undependability of a good many employees. The president of the giant William J. Burns International Detective Agency wrote an article for Business Management that was entitled: “Does Your Plant Invite Theft?” He offered a 27-point check list of danger spots that needed to be watched, and called attention to the value of undercover operatives.
And a giant investigative firm based in Miami, the Wackenhut Corporation, has been bombarding managements with a brochure headed: “How Secure Is Your Business?” It asks: “Are your employees thoroughly screened before they are hired? . . . Have your offices been checked for the presence of electronic listening devices?” etc.
The growth of investigation as a full-fledged and potent industry has been greatly assisted by a new and unprecedented phenomenon. That is the fact that many thousands of men who have received thorough and intensive training in surveillance and investigative techniques by the U.S. Government have made themselves available in the possibly greener pastures of private enterprise.
Such highly trained investigators include not only former military and Central Intelligence Agency specialists in espionage, policing, intelligence, and counterintelligence but graduates of such other intelligence agencies as the Secret Service, former Treasury agents, former General Accounting Office watchdogs, civil service investigators, postal inspectors, and special agents of the FBI. These graduates number in the tens of thousands. Some have gone into jobs completely unrelated to their government specialties, but many thousands are making at least some use of their government training in watching or handling people in their new careers.
One of the nation’s more fabulous private investigators, John Cye Cheasty of New York, is a graduate of the U.S. Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Intelligence Unit, and Navy Intelligence units. (He attained the rank of commander in the Navy.) In commenting on the techniques he uses as a private investigator when he is developing reports on business executives or candidates for executive jobs, he said he felt that investigators such as himself could do the job better than the usual representatives from a company’s personnel department. He explained:
“We have ways of getting information, ways of interviewing, that are different than the ways used by personnel departments. We can get to people we want to see faster because we have learned our techniques in the service. We have learned techniques for commanding attention, commanding the truth, and commanding the information without seeming to be aggressive or imperative about it. We can move in and take over an interview and get what we want.”
The role of the ex-FBI special agents in U.S. society offers an interesting case in point since they command, however justifiably, the most awe from the public. Industry courts them for all sorts of roles. In 1962 the Wall Street Journal carried the headline: MORE COMPANIES FIND MANAGEMENT TALENT AMOUNG EXFBI AGENTS.
There are now apparently at least three quarters as many ex-FBI agents as active FBI agents in the U.S. Approximately 6000 men are active agents, and the membership of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (national headquarters: 274 Madison Avenue, New York) is near 4500. Presumably not all former agents have bothered to maintain membership. The society prints a newsletter that serves as a sort of grapevine for the organization.
Among the ex-FBI agents are clergymen, admen, writers, professors, ranchers, bankers, oil operators, dentists, and a number of corporate presidents. They include at least one neurological surgeon. And of course there are a great many accountants and lawyers. The 1961 directory of the society listed as members two governors (New Mexico and North Carolina) and the attorney general of Florida (who gave as his regular occupation “special investigator”).
An interesting concentration of ex-FBI men, incidentally, has existed, at least until very recently, on the working staff of the American Security Council (Chicago), a militantly right-wing organization that is supported by several thousand companies and other organized groups. It disseminates information about what it considers to be statist and Communist conspiracies; publishes reports on national and international military and political developments as seen by its business or military-oriented analysts; and in the recent past it has provided information on names of employees or applicants submitted to it by corporate personnel officers of many of its member companies.
Our main interest in the Council, however, is in the following fact: As of 1962, its president, its administrative director, and its Washington bureau chief were all listed as ex-FBI men in the 1961 directory of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal