If information is power, Americans should be uneasy about the amount of information the federal government is starting to file on its citizens in its blinking memory banks. There are, for example, the gigantic memory machines that the Internal Revenue Service is starting to use to check data from our tax returns against data accumulated about us from other sources, such as employers and banks. The computers also watch for unlikely patterns. Obviously these memory banks are useful tools for fair and efficient tax collecting. But what are the implications for two decades from now, in 1984? If future bureaucrats choose, they can build up so-called “cum,” or cumulative files, on each taxpayer over decades, and thus will have, instantly recallable, a vast amount of personal information about the living habits of every adult in the realm.
One computer maker, Bernard S. Benson, bluntly concedes that concentration of power in the form of accumulated information can be “catastrophically dangerous.” He suggests that individual privacy ultimately may be at the mercy of the man in a position to push the button that makes the machine remember. At an international conference on information processing sponsored by UNESCO in Paris, he reminded his colleagues that it was “high time” they started devoting part of their conferences to discussing how to insure that any new accomplishments will be beneficial to mankind.
Whatever the benefits, the marvelous new electronic devices with memories or ears or eyes are serving to push back the boundaries of each individual’s privacy. As we shall shortly see, the electronic eyes and ears are being put to a host of ingenious uses for the purpose of people-watching.
These five forces that are at work in the society of the United States—and to some degree in most highly industrial societies of the world—have accounted for an immense growth of surveillance over individual citizens and a massive invasion of their privacy.
Some Specific Areas of Assault
3. How to Strip a Job-Seeker Naked
“Bill, one more question before you leave. . . . Are you inclined to be homosexual?”—Question that the author heard a polygraph examiner address to a young man being considered for a salesman’s job
A few years ago a management consultant in Chicago told me, “We have developed techniques that strip people psychologically naked.”1 At the time I thought he was merely showing an entrepreneur’s exuberance in promoting some psychiatrically oriented assessment sheets he had developed for personnel directors to use in assessing managerial can-didates for private industry. Now I find a gigantic trend, involving thousands of companies, toward investigating all or most job applicants, not just would-be executives, to the point where the individuals are often deprived of virtually every shred of privacy.
All across the country, managements are evincing a growing wariness about taking on new “teammates.” They used to size up a man by looking him over and by determining his “trade reputation.” That is no longer enough. The increasing suspiciousness is illustrated in a booklet widely circulated by the American Management Association. It is titled “How to Keep Bad Apples Out of the Barrel.” The cover illustration shows two men—one at a file and one at a desk—eyeing each other suspiciously.
The booklet, by a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin, describes how a prospective employee’s private life can be investigated by “personal interviews with the neighbors both at his present address and at two or three of his former locations.” And the blurb explains, “With the workforce more on the move than ever before, companies now run the risk of finding themselves loaded down with all kinds of undesirable employees.”
Possibly another reason for the growing wariness is that a company takes on a larger commitment than in earlier decades when a man is hired, because of all the payments that must be made by the company for unemployment compensation, Social Security, insurance, pensions. Also, many companies find it necessary to make commitments in the form of job-security agreements with the unions.
But the suspiciousness of managements is also encouraged by the proliferating investigative firms, search firms, and psychological testing firms who keep worrying them as insistently as the deodorant makers asking in their commercials: “But can you be sure?” Managements are warned that the ordinary employment interview is ineffective as a safeguard because the applicant is on his good behavior then. They are warned that ordinary application forms can be filled with a pack of lies. They are warned that letters of reference are farcical and only a fool would trust them. They are warned that even a telephone call to a former superior may produce false assurances because the former superior may be pleased to be well rid of the man or may fear a slander suit.
What is the answer? It is a probe in depth. This may cost anywhere from $15 to $250 depending on the importance of the job and the probing techniques used. Each year several million Americans are subjected to these probes, often without their knowledge. We shall explore three of the major approaches:
—The use of a straight sleuthing to do a “background” check or compile a life history.
-—The use of lie detectors.
—The use of psychiatrists, psychologists, or psychological apprentices armed with tests to make a personality analysis.
There is some overlapping in the kind of personal information each is designed to uncover; but each also is assumed to be superior in uncovering certain areas of one’s life, soul, and psyche. Let us examine them in turn.
1. The Use of Investigative Sleuthing
A corporate personnel director may simply turn to a local private eye. One such private investigator in the Baltimore area confided to the pages of Police Review his practices in making an employment check. He digs up everything he can about a prospect by talking with neighbors, former employers, and co-workers. “At no time,” he asserted, “is the identity of the inquiring client made known to the persons being questioned about the applicant.” (My own practice is to shut the door on any investigator who will not disclose at the outset who wants the information and why.)
Our private eye in Baltimore, after checking out his facts, turns in a report to the personnel manager. If his report contains “derogatory data,” he said, the applicant may be granted the privilege of furnishing an oral explanation in a “private interview” with the personnel manager. He said that one personnel manager, in granting such a “private interview,” usually “requests a tape recording of the interview [made without the applicant’s knowledge] for subsequent evaluation with our office.” If after the interview the man is not hired, “the recording is erased forever. If he is placed on the payroll, the tape is retained in his personnel folder for later inconsistencies that may arise in which veracity may be the issue.”
If the applicant has been working in another town or state the client probably will turn to an investigative network, such as Fidelifacts, with its 200 ex-FBI special agents scattered in many cities. These ex-FBI men conduct personal interviews with former employers, check the neighborhood, the bank, the local police, and so on. The New York City branch of Fidelifacts reports that in one large sampling of its works it had turned up “adverse information” in 29 per cent of its investigations of prospective employees. (It cited wife trouble, evidence of drunkenness, absenteeism, indebtedness, poor job performance, etc.) The head of the New York office, Vincent Gillen, who has also worked as a lawyer and a professor, finds the horizons for such “pre-employment investigations”