—The right to hope for tolerant forgiveness or overlooking of past foolishnesses, errors, humiliations, or minor sins—in short, the Christian notion of the possibility of redemption.
—The right to make a fresh start.
America was largely settled, and its frontiers expanded, by people seeking to get away from something unpleasant in their pasts, either oppression, painful episodes, poverty, or misdemeanors.
Today it is increasingly assumed that the past and present of all of us—virtually every aspect of our lives—must be an open book; and that all such information about us can be not only put in files but merchandised freely. Business empires are being built on this merchandising of information about people’s private lives. The expectation that one has a right to be let alone—the whole idea that privacy is a right worth cherishing—seems to be evaporating among large segments of our population.
There appears to be little awareness today among the complacent that no one is secure unless everyone is secure from the overeager constable, the over-zealous investigator, and the over-nosy bureaucrat. Totalitarianism typically begins when a would-be tyrant—whether a Hitler or a Castro—plays upon the anxieties of the majority to institute repressive measures against despised or troublesome minorities. Gradually the repressive measures are extended, perhaps inexorably, to larger and larger segments of the populace.
It was to protest the possibility of such an eventuality in the U.S.A. that Mr. Justice Brandeis issued his eloquent dissent in a case in 1928 involving surveillance. He said:
“The makers of our Constitution . . . sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most valued by civilized men.”
Today, as we shall see, the Bill of Rights is under assault from many directions. Thomas Jefferson’s vow that he had sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man has a quaint ring to many people in 1964. Aldous Huxley commented that the classic cry of Patrick Henry that he wanted either liberty or death now sounds melodramatic. Instead today, Huxley contended, we are more apt to demand, “Give me television and hamburgers but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty.”
It is worth noting that Mr. Huxley’s prophetic book, Brave New World, written way back in the thirties about a technological society living in doped-up bliss under a watchful tyrant six centuries from now, has been banned from several U.S. schools. Also among the banned is George Orwell’s 1984, depicting life under the ever-present electronic eye and ear of a tyrannical Big Brother a bare two decades from now. When the U.S. Commissioner of Education was asked about the banning of these two classics from a Miami high school, he declined to comment because he said he had never heard of either of the books!
Many of the present invasions of our privacy originate in the kinds of life the citizens have chosen to pursue. Often such intrusions can be checked only by an aroused concern about individual rights. Other of the invasions, as we shall see, are susceptible to legal restraint. In general the legal checks are in a state of lamentable confusion, vagueness, or neglect. One judge has described the state of the law of privacy, for example, as “still that of a haystack in a hurricane.”
In the chapters that follow, let us then try to understand what is happening to our privacy—and our freedom—as individuals in the face of the new kinds of pressure generated by our violently changing world. As we explore this subject we might bear in mind a haunting comment made to me by Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, who has led several battles for individual rights on the floor of Congress. He said:
“Basically I am not hopeful about the pressures that will in time make our country something of a police state. Unless we can bring a release from the prolonged Cold War and can check the inward drift of our country, I sense a losing game.”
2. Five Forces Undermining Our Privacy
“The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.”—Chief Justice Earl Warren
In stable primitive societies the attitudes of the people in regard to what is proper and decent in personal relations—including respect for privacy—do not change much from century to century. In the Western world today, however, swirling forces are causing whole populations willy-nilly to change their attitudes, ideals, and behavior patterns within decades. This is nowhere more dramatically apparent than in the United States.
One effect of these forces is the undermining of respect for privacy. And there is a straining after even better ways to sort, inspect, control, and keep an eye on individuals.
I shall note here five of the forces produced by the changing nature of our society and technology with the hope that the reader will bear them in mind as underlying factors when we later examine their effects in detail. Throughout, our concern will be with these underlying forces, not with individual villains.
1. The Great Increase in Organized Living
In the coming decade another 40,000,000 people will be added to the population of the U.S., a figure approximately equal to all the people now living in the western half of the nation. And by the end of the present decade four-fifths of all Americans will be living in metropolitan areas. Until quite recent times most of the nation’s citizens had little experience of urban living with its tendency to reduce self-sufficiency and to require that the individual relate to large organizations.
Closeness of living does not necessarily destroy privacy. Holland is one of the most thickly populated nations in the world and yet, until very recently, individual privacy was greatly respected. But genuine considerateness toward others has not been a notable trait in the average American’s make-up for several decades. And as America’s empty spaces began filling up, the inhabitants developed an increasingly gregarious style of life. Perhaps they were over-reacting to what historian Walter Prescott Webb called “the nauseating loneliness of frontier life.” And perhaps now the overreacting is changing. But a few years ago an Argentine visitor referred to modern Americans (U.S. breed) as “friendly as puppies—and just as nosy.” A lag has developed between the habits of a people and the condition of their existence, so that personal privacy suffers.
Simultaneously there has been the continuous growth of giant organizations in U.S. society. Michigan State’s Professor Eugene Jennings observed that “organizations consume our privacy.” And Clark Kerr, now president of the University of California, has commented that the destruction of privacy seems to issue from the logic of organization itself.
As technology develops, it spawns large organizations—both business and governmental—to keep up with technology. U.S. society in a little more than a century has moved from being a nation of entrepreneurs to being a nation of employees. Most people today work for large organizations.
The larger an organization becomes, the more its managers seem to be obsessed with controls on the people involved, to keep the organization from flying apart. Since the top managers in bureaucracies cannot hope to know all the individuals in their organization they resort to appraisal forms, cumulative files, six-page application forms, and lie detectors as a means of “knowing” their people better. And being dedicated to rationality, the managers become obsessed with assigning numbers to people.
Congressman Kastenmeier relates that when his three-year-old son opened a $10 bank account the bank asked for the lad’s Social Security number. It may well be that within a few years organizational logic will require that a Social Security number be put on each newborn person’s birth certificate—and follow him to his grave.
Officially, one’s Social Security number is a well-guarded secret and cannot be used to keep track of people’s whereabouts. But I was told that some states have been using Social Security numbers to trace deserting fathers. And private detectives told me they had often got a man’s number merely by calling