The Listeners

The Listeners
Author: Brian Hochman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674249283

TheyÕve been listening for longer than you think. A new history reveals howÑand why. Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early twentieth centuryÑand they have spied on their own customers too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here? In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US governmentÕs wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike. From wayward lovers to foreign spies, from private detectives to public officials, and from the silver screen to the Supreme Court, The Listeners traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States. Along the way, Brian Hochman considers how earlier generations of Americans confronted threats to privacy that now seem more urgent than ever.

The Eavesdroppers

The Eavesdroppers
Author: Samuel Dash
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
Total Pages: 504
Release: 1971-02-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping
Author: John L. Locke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199236135

Who among us hasn't eavesdropped on a stranger's conversation in a theater or restaurant? Indeed, scientists have found that even animals eavesdrop on the calls and cries of others. In Eavesdropping, John L. Locke provides the first serious look at this virtually universal phenomenon. Locke's entertaining and disturbing account explores everything from sixteenth-century voyeurism to Hitchcock's "Rear Window"; from chimpanzee behavior to Parisian cafe society; from private eyes to Facebook and Twitter. He uncovers the biological drive behind the behavior and highlights its consequences across history and cultures. Eavesdropping can be a good thing--an attempt to understand what goes on in the lives of others so as to know better how to live one's own. Even birds who listen in on the calls of distant animals tend to survive longer. But Locke also concedes that eavesdropping has a bad name. It can encompass cheating to get unfair advantage, espionage to uncover secrets, and secretly monitoring emails to maintain power over employees. In the age of CCTV, phone tapping, and computer hacking, this is eye-opening reading. "

Understanding Surveillance Technologies

Understanding Surveillance Technologies
Author: J.K. Petersen
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 1021
Release: 2007-02-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 084938320X

Understanding Surveillance Technologies demystifies spy devices and describes how technology is used to observe and record intimate details of people‘s lives often without their knowledge or consent. From historical origins to current applications, it explains how satellites, pinhole cameras, cell phone and credit card logs, DNA kits, tiny m

American Privacy

American Privacy
Author: Frederick S. Lane
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2009
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0807044415

A page-turning narrative of privacy and the evolution of communication, from broken sealing wax to high-tech wiretapping