Urban living has played a part in making citizens more fearful of being beset by criminals. In many urban areas these anxieties have a sound basis. In the first three months of 1963 the FBI’s Crime Index indicated that the volume of serious crimes had risen seven per cent during the preceding year. A growth in population and a growth in temptations in a nation increasingly swollen with material goods could help to account for much of the increase.
Law-enforcement officials cry out for more effective tools and techniques for catching the criminals. They argue that criminals have become so slick in developing organizations based on business models and in using the aids of modern technology that the law enforcers must be permitted to become slicker and rougher. The Police Review carried the headline: LEGALIZED WIRETAPPING ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, in quoting Brooklyn’s district attorney. The late New York tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, editorially called for the fingerprinting of all Americans.
News accounts of the prevalence of criminals have persuaded many millions of Americans, too, that the police must indeed become slicker and rougher. Much of the public anxiety about crime, incidentally, seems to be concentrated in urban redevelopment areas. Here the residents usually live in relatively expensive new apartments built in the midst of low-income areas where the people often are of different ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds and may be envious, resentful, or disdainful of their seemingly rich, stuck-up new neighbors.
At any rate we have the paradox of a society trying to put men on the moon when millions of its urban residents do not dare to walk alone at night in streets or parks near their homes.
The same society that breeds criminals by the millions demands that its police catch the criminals, even if they must trample on constitutional rights and existing laws to do so. There is little awareness that lawlessness is a symptom of national character and that the character must change before the symptoms can be significantly affected. To cite an extreme, a Methodist minister in Dallas charged, after President Kennedy’s assassination, that “the spirit of assassination” had flourished in Dallas for some time. There were reports of small children in several public schools clapping and cheering when their teachers told them of the terrible event. The children were reflecting not only the intolerance of their parents but the new genteel lawlessness that forgives assaults, in violation of law, against people who are disapproved of for one reason or another. In Northern cities genteel citizens have condoned the use by police of lawless or heavy-handed methods against suspects who happen to be members of minority groups that have produced a disproportionate share of disturbance of the peace of their particular urban society.
The United States cannot hope even to start becoming a law-abiding society until the great majority of its citizens know in their hearts that the constitutional rights of every citizen must be respected.
2. The Movement Toward a Garrison State Mentality
Although not the least bit militaristic as a people, Americans are being swept toward being a martial—and thus watched—society. The impetus comes from the facts of the cold war, the space race, and the growing appreciation of how defense and space spending spur the nation’s economy.
Tens of thousands of employees of federal agencies spend all or much of their time handling secret data. And then of course there are about 2,700,000 citizens in the U.S. armed forces who require varying degrees of surveillance based on their assignments.
More disquieting has been the spread of security precautions in U.S. industrial plants that do some business with the Pentagon. Business Week estimates that 24,000 industrial facilities are now under Pentagon regulations on security and that more than 3,500,000 industrial employees in the past fourteen years have had to obtain clearances.
Many of the companies are so anxious not to lose their contacts with the Pentagon that, to be on the safe side, they allow their security officers to push defense-type precautions into other areas of the company. In such instances little distinction in hiring and surveillance policy is made between employees working on defense contracts and those in the commercial, non-military phases of their company’s operations. The industrial security chief for Temco Electronics was quoted in 1962 as stating: “Regardless of where a man is going to work, his background should be looked at as carefully as if he were going to work on classified material.”
The fact that the United States has been involved in four hot wars during this century and in a prolonged cold war for most of the last two decades is responsible for the continual introduction of new surveillance techniques and social controls. What is disturbing, however, is that the government rarely relinquishes such wartime techniques and controls when the shooting ends.
In the national emergency of 1941 President Roosevelt, as Commander-in-Chief, quietly authorized his Attorney General, Robert Jackson, to resort to wiretapping in urgent cases involving the nation’s security. This action was taken in the face of what seemed to be a flat prohibition against wiretapping for any reason. In 1934 Congress had voted such a prohibition when it enacted the now notorious Section 605 of the Communications Act.
Mr. Jackson found that one phrase, by straining, could be rationalized into an authorization to tap. That phrase said it was a crime to “intercept” and “divulge” messages. Mr. Jackson decided that for the emergency this could be stretched to mean that it was all right to intercept as long as you did not divulge. He chose to ignore a nearby phrase banning the “use” of any intercepted message.
The war emergency ended; but all of the U.S. Attorneys General since Mr. Jackson, including the incumbent one, have embraced his interpretation to justify wiretapping, when it seemed to be warranted, for “leads” only. And many local law-enforcement officials have echoed the Attorneys General. The interpretation has been mouthed so many times that people assume it is the “law.”
Another hangover of wartime measures is the use of recording devices attached to telephones to monitor calls you make or receive. Before World War II there was occasional use of such devices at the War Department, with the switchboard operators scrupulously notifying the party on the other end of the line that the call would be recorded. As the war emergency approached, the demand for recordings became so urgent that the Signal Corps installed a great many of the devices and notice to the calling party was discontinued! By 1945 more than 2000 of them were in operation. An FCC report in 1947 related that “The wartime experience gained with telephone recording devices has resulted in an unprecedented commercial demand since V-J day.” By 1947 there were 19,000 recorders in use in the U.S., three quarters of them by business organizations, with no legal requirement that the other party be notified. Meanwhile in Washington the use of monitoring continued to grow.
Consider a final example. Few people realize it, but a sedition statute that goes back to World War I and is still in effect declares it a crime willfully to make false statements about the U.S. armed forces that could interfere with their success or to make any kind of statements intended to discourage enlistments. This statute was revived in 1953 while the nation was in a state of emergency, while winding up the Korean War, and today the government refuses to declare the emergency ended. Perhaps it never will. Technically the Southerners who criticized use of federal troops during crises involving civil rights for Negroes could have been prosecuted for sedition since such statements conceivably might discourage enlistments in some areas. Similarly those Republicans who suggested that the Russians had not pulled their missiles out of Cuba could be prosecuted since this was contrary to official statements. No Attorney General in recent decades has chosen to enforce this statute in peacetime. But a would-be dictator could have a fine time using it to hound critics.
An even greater legacy of suspicion and surveillance has followed in the wake of the prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union. The devious tactics of Communists provided very real grounds for acting vigorously to counteract them. But it is also unfortunately true that a good many people have focused all their anxieties and hostilities into a generalized fear of Communism, and that this fear has been exploited in many cases by members of the radical right to harass anyone with whom they seriously