This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
On the battlegrounds of the US Civil War, both sides relied on a surprising weapon—the telegraph. This new electronic communication system was crucial for coordinating troop movements, managing supply lines, and transmitting military intelligence. But like all technologies, it came with vulnerabilities. Messages traveling through wires could be intercepted, or “tapped,” revealing critical plans to the enemy. Civil war telegraphers also tapped lines to send fraudulent messages and confuse their enemy. To counter these risks, the Union and Confederacy developed early cipher systems to disguise communications and confirm their authenticity.
The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Brian Hochman traces the history of wiretapping, or the “act of intercepting or recording messages or voice conversations transmitted over electronic communications networks,” back to Civil War era (1861-1865) espionage. Though often thought of as a uniquely 21st-century problem, Hochman shows that wiretapping has a much longer, more complex, and more contested history than many realize. Wiretapping has been a part of America’s electronic communications systems from the beginning, and, according to Hochman, the American ideal of electronic privacy has never truly existed in practice. The Listeners traces the evolution of the wiretap from a “specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of American life.”
Every generation seems to have its own wiretapping scandal. Hochman guides readers through 160 years of colorful history, including cases of Prohibition-era surveillance of bootleggers and speakeasies, illegal government surveillance of suspected spies during WWII, the Nixon and Watergate scandal, the wiretapping of Civil Rights leaders, and the aftermath of September 11, 2001. In each of these periods, the law struggled to keep pace with the rapidly developing telecommunication technologies, in part because legislators were unable to predict every way that information could be recorded, intercepted, and manipulated.
Private citizens and companies, not just the government, have used wiretaps in creative ways. For example, Hochman recounts how in 1864, D.C. Williams, a con artist, was caught running a complex insider trading scheme using information intercepted from telegraphs. Gangsters and bootleggers spied on police, often more than the other way around. Private detectives tapped conversations to investigate marital disputes, and companies paid spies to tap their telephones to monitor labor union influence among employees. All of these unofficial eavesdroppers were among “the listeners,” says Hochman.
These ties to criminal activity contributed to creating wiretapping’s reputation as a “dirty business,” which threatened Americans’ civil liberties. Then, as the US government increased its use of wiretaps, and “law and order” politics grew in the 1960s, what had initially been a strong grassroots opposition to wiretapping began to fade. Today many Americans willingly invite listening devices from major technology companies into their homes. For Hochman, this remains an important puzzle. How is it that so many Americans became so comfortable with being listened to? Part of the answer, he says, is that the ascendance of law and order politics normalized wiretapping as “good police work” in America.
Hochman researched The Listeners as a 2018 Kluge Fellow. It was awarded the 2023 Surveillance Studies Network Book Prize and was selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 20 Nonfiction Books of 2022.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.