THE LISTENERS

A study of how electronic surveillance became an accepted tool of law enforcement and a pervasive feature of everyday life.

Hochman, the director of American Studies at Georgetown, traces the origins of wiretapping to the Civil War, when spies on both sides learned to intercept the enemy’s telegraph messages. The war hadn’t even ended before D.C. Williams, a California commodities trader, was tapping into competitors’ telegrams to make lucrative trades. Soon, wiretaps were a standard weapon in the scam artist’s repertoire, notably in getting inside information on gambling results. With the arrival of the telephone, crooks learned to exploit the new medium, especially for blackmail purposes. Law enforcement didn’t lag far behind: New York City detectives were tapping phones as early as 1895. Hochman examines critical court cases establishing the status of wiretap evidence. A significant precedent was a 1928 case in which the Supreme Court sanctioned Prohibition agents’ use of wiretaps to convict a bootlegger. Congress tried to reverse the precedent a few years later, with the Federal Communications Act, making it illegal to intercept and divulge the contents of an electronic communication. In 1940, a secret memo by Franklin Roosevelt allowed federal wiretaps in national security cases, a decision that pleased the FBI. But in 1950, Judge Learned Hand threw out a conviction in an espionage case built largely on wiretap evidence, and the issue went back to Congress. By the 1960s, the FBI was bugging a long roster of suspected radicals, from Malcolm X to Benjamin Spock, and Nixon was recording White House conversations. The author follows the trends into the computer age, with Congress opening the gates to almost universal spying with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Amply documented, occasionally dry, this is a solid study of the legal and technical evolution of electronic spying.

A thorough history of wiretapping as it moved from a criminal act to a legitimate tool of law enforcement.