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Television companies, supports cspan2 as a public service. Hello, everybody. Peter maravelis here are coping this finds you all safe and look at a deficit like booksellers and owners and publishers and the City Lights Foundation i would like to welcome you to our virtual reading series that follows in the footsteps of our calendar during the time of the pandemic. A big shout it and welcome to all of our cspan viewers joining us tonight. As always we are being to you from unseated an essential grounds also has a San Francisco bay area from where we continue to celebrate the works of authors we know in love with readings, discussions and forums. Tonight it is a pleasure to have with us Brian Hochman celebrate the publication of his new book titled the listeners a history of wiretapping in the United States. Brian hochman instructive american studies and at asse professor of english at georgetown university. The author of the book savage preservation, the ethnographic origins of modern Media Technology which was a finalist for the American Cities associations laura romero prize for first, best first book. His academic writings have appeared in american literature, African American review, notes and queries as well as many, many other journals. His research in electronic surveillance has been featured in history, the Smithsonian Magazine and the washington post. Joining him tonight in conversation is matthew guariglia. Matthew guariglia is a political analyst and currently serves as an affiliated scholar in institute of criminal justice at the university of california Hastings School of law. He researches the history of euros policing and is a policy analyst for surveillance and privacy at the Electronic Frontier foundation. He is coeditor of the essential Kerner Commission report and his bylines have appeared in nbc news, the washington post, slate, motherboard, and the freedom of Information Center outlet. He serves as an editor of disciplining the city a series on the urban come on history of urban policing at and incarcn at the urban history associations blog, the metropole. So please join us that in giving warm welcome to Brian Hochman and matthew guariglia. Gentlemen, welcome to city lights. Thanks so much, peter. I i want to start by thanking cy lights for inviting me. I want to thank my publicist at Harvard University press, amanda, for arranging this, and also i want to thank my interlocutors this evening, matthew guariglia. Its really exciting to be talking about this new book with you all. Im really excited to get started. So im going to just do quick, two quick things before i hand the reins over to matthew and we get our conversation started in earnest. Im going to share first a brief excerpt from the book that will hopefully give you some sense of the project and some of the characters it follows, and also going to talk a little bit, little bit more informally about the broader stakes of the project. Just to set the stage for the conversation, ill talk a a le bit about the main argument i advance in the book, then we are hoping and we talked for 45 minutes or so to open up the virtual floor for whatever questions the folks in the audience happy so without further ado i will share what i call the ballad of the williams. D. C. Waynes work the trading desk at a small Investment Firm in plaster ville california about 45 miles east of sacramento. He spent a day doing what most everyone in the Financial Sector does for a living. He studied trends and he made deals. He bought low and he sold high. He kept a close eye all the while on the regular movements of the market. Williams also had a knack for electronics and specialist Technical Skills helped him pick up a second job that involved wiretapping. So this job williams sometimes went by the names h franklin, or d. C. And this, depending on wt sort of work was required. Over the span of a short few months Williams Team noted right across the state of california by devising a scheme that allowed him to do both jobs, trading stocks and tapping wires at the same time. It made him a wealthy man. The scheme was effective as it was clever. Williams would tap into the communications of manufacturing firms and Mining Companies in sacramento and nearby San Francisco. Anything that a corporate entity would consider confidential. Williams would then relay the news to a syndicate of stockbrokers posted in locations as farflung as new york and virginia. The brokers may Financial Moves based on the intercepted information, returning cut of the profits to class of it. The genius of the scheme wasnt simply that it loud williams to eavesdrop on Privileged Communications to get also capitalize on the time it takes to send an electronic signal across the region as fast as that of the continent of United States. A short period of time but a period of time nonetheless. After bribing a few wellconnected officials come williams found a way to transmit the content of his wiretaps while slowing the speed with which the original corporate messages reached the intended destinations. If brokers could buy and sell stocks moments before anyone else, taking advantage of illegal tips all while appearing to go along with the rhythms of the market. The arrangement proved lucrative. Williams correspondence later produced this evidence in court revealed that the members of his syndicate had made a small fortune while the wiretapping scam was up and running. But everything came crashing down when an anonymous tip with the authorities onto his trail. After a brief investigation, detectives in placerville erected, excuse me, arrested williams in the act of tapping the corporate network. He was soon tried, convicted, and sent to prison under an obscure california statute prohibiting the intersection of electronic messages. Reporters covering the case pronounced it a, quote, new chapter in trying. A reminder that advances in Communications Almost always produce advances in eavesdropping. That year, heres the twist to the story, was 1864. Williams was the First American ever jailed for tapping a wire. So this book, the listeners, explores the history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in america from the age of the telegraph come from the age of williams to the very near present. And the books central storyline explores how it is that wiretapping transforms from a dirty business, socalled come associate with criminals like williams to an acceptable Law Enforcement tactic used widely in investigation of crime and the protection of National Security. After that i will say that this is not the book that i expected to write. When i started out on this project eight years ago, i envision myself telling a story about spies and secrets, a story that probe the recesses of the past and exposed the history that had been long been hidden in the archives. Instead, as i worked through the sources, the story that i uncovered was an much more public story, and a much more prosaic story in the end, a story about tapped telephones and civil suits and divorce cases, a a story about bugging devices in boardrooms and labor union meetings. And finally i think most importantly a story about electronic surveillance techniques in the hands of the police. The entity that turned most use and abuse electronic surveillance over time. The characters who turned out to be critical to this more public and prosaic story were not spies and saboteurs working for Shadowy Government institutions. They were instead private investigators and police detectives, bootleggers, mobsters and conmen, adulterers and Civil Liberties activists, politicians and even film stars. These were the people behind the wiretaps public face, its prosaic face. And the book that ive written tries outline for very broad reading audience the sinister and the think somewhat surprising world that these individuals made. The last thing i will say here before turning over to matthew has to do with a kind of central argument that i think is worth highlighting here. One of the most important through lines of the book is that its the rise of law and order politics that help normalize the practice of wiretapping in america. It turns out that state and federal agencies like the fbi, like the cia came relatively late to the wiretaps game. And it was only in aftermath of a nationwide panic over race and street crime in the 1960s, a a full century after the invention of the wiretaps, that lawmakers in washington finally found a way to institutionalize the government wiretap authority. This is something theyve been trying to do for decades, for several decades, almost 40 years. I want to underscore that within the field for surveillance studies, also within the field of American History and history of technology, this is something of a counterintuitive or even i think our radical argument. Above all that heretical above all it insinuates the project of electronics of ends in america not as a kind of kneejerk response to public spheres about communism or terrorism of the kind of threats to the domestic order. Bite instead it situates it as a kind of gradual accommodation to the political priorities and also the Law Enforcement imperatives that of help to build the modern cultural state. Moving back in time, was the war on drugs and before it the war on our call during prohibition that help to turn the wiretaps into an acceptable investigative tool. And i think we still live the consequences of those historical and political relationships. We still live those consequences today and i think this is probably i imagine a matter that will come up in our conversation here this evening. So with that i will turn over to you, matt. Thanks. Thank you. This is one heck of a book. I really enjoyed reading it. One thing i really enjoyed about this book and kind of goes to the type of history i look for when i look at this scholarship is that it doesnt just tell about the technology of surveillance, the legality of surveillance. It is a history of the culture of surveillance, but also its a political history of knowledge in many ways. Its a story of who can acquire knowledge, how they can get it, especially how that knowledge can then make a person vulnerable. It is the political and the empowered life of knowledge that im very interested in an own scholarship, thinking about surveillance. In that way we learned the struggles are not new, that rendering a person vulnerable by acquiring knowledge about them through surveillance this man, through wiretapping, is a tale as old as wires themselves in a way. One of the things i wanted to begin talking about was this incredible phrase that you use right after your ballad of d. C. Williams, which is this feeling of when you find something in archives when you read something in history that happened 100, 150 years ago that seem so reminiscent and so, an echo of conversations that we are having now, that you wonder if anything at all has changed, and if so, how its changed. So there were a a number of ts in his book when i i had historical vertigo, thinking about the people look at rich selling this technology to police, thinking about the rubberstamping of surveillance warrants, and wondering just how tenacious judges would be in allowing or disallowing different types of surveillance. Even just last week a story emerged about how immigration and Customs Enforcement have been sending overly broad subpoenas to Western Union for bulk Financial Data of people in the southwest, sending money back and forth between mexico and the United States. And reading about the resistance to government surveillance efforts by Western Union in the 1880s, again, gave me this feeling of historic vertigo that i was one if you talk a little bit about finding the stories in the archives, experiencing that for the first time, and reflecting on what significant that has come what does that mean for us now reading these histories and still trying to find surveillance in 2021 . 2022, excuse me. What is time anymore . Thats the fantastic question, and i think the project started from this feeling of historical vertigo that i had. And i talk about this in the introduction to the book is that i sort of uncovered i kind of happened, stumble upon the story of d. C. Williams and was astonished that it took place in the 1860s. He was a prosecutor special prosecutor in the state of california in the 1862, and i was kind of gob smacked. I didnt know wiretapping went back that far, and the kind of starting point for the project was simply to ask myself, one, why did he go back that far . And why dont i know that . Why do we continually think of these problems, problems of knowledge as you say, problems come sometimes a call in problems of privacy but its also i think i like different of it as problems of knowledge in problems of technology and power, widely, so he think about them as new and novel . Why do we constantly encounter them afresh with kind of fresh outrage every time theres a new revelation . Theres a certain sense, i mean, part of me thinks that historical vertigo suggest that not that much has changed over time. These are very old problems. Thats kind of a dispiriting feeling. The relationships that the kind of story of d. C. Williams reveals scenes so kind of modern, so contemporary. It kind of suggests that relationships are kind of intractable. They are a a part of our Communications Ecosystem and theres nothing we can do to eradicate them or kind of push back against them. But one of the other through lines that i try to highlight in the book is the extent to which actually americans have pushed back against this problem of knowledge gathering, information control, these problems of privacy. And they were to a certain extent successful over time. It took a very long time for the government to establish its wiretap authority. It took about a century, and in that time ordinary americans, politicians of various political stripes push back against the encouragement of government and technology. I think thats also something that marks the kind of change over time. Even as much as these problems seem perennial, even as much as we are constantly encountering these vertiginous kind of historical cases. Americans have fought back and, in fact, a commitment to privacy and civil rights and Civil Liberties was far more mainstream in american political life in the 1960s, the 1950s, the 1940s than 1940s than it certainly is today. One of the things i try to get in the book is to uncover that change over time, even as much as im sketching some broad continuities between then and now. Yeah, i think youre absolute right and identify that change over time and i think you nailed it spot on in identifying peoples willingness to put up with government surveillance, at least that he come slowly normalize and the norm over time with the rise of the car shall state pick that even the way that police props behave now, police in some commute is obviously theres a great continuity of Police Violence specifically and black neighborhood communities but the way that please behave now, the way that they deploy surveillance now our problem in ways that me think reading a book that would not have been so tolerated but for the sphere of street crime and the willingness to throw military equipment, surveillance, whatever it is at street crime, at petty crime with, unico war on drugs, war crime, broken windows all the way forward. Im glad you identify that and i totally agree. One thing i wonder about is no is nongovernmental surveillance. I am really happy your book touches on that because at least today when people are worried about their passwords being compromised, when they worry about what could happen with their phones, a lot of that concern isnt about police. Its often about dubious actors, hackers, ransomware. Its about people getting hold of your spotify account and extracted whatever information from it. And you really kind of i think tell the long history of your information being rendered vulnerable not just to the state by two other people who would use that information badly as well as when you talk a little bit about that and whether not use that as kind of a departure from existing literature on surveillance. Obviously josh lauer just had this great book about corporate surveillance and corporate data collection. Often times for kind of marketing and advertising purposes but i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about nongovernmental surveillance. Theres a certain extension to which the kind of kneejerk associations that we have now with surveillance and Corporate Culture or what scholars would now call surveillance capitalis capitalism, weve kind of boomeranged ourselves back to a much earlier phase of history. Really prior to the late 1960s, early 1970s, and this is something that was really surprising to me and researching this book here the ordinary american was far more afraid of their phone being tapped are far more outraged with the idea of the phone being tapped, not by the federal government, by the fbi or the cia, but by private actors, what were called in the 1950s private fears, kind of rogue hybrid investigators with electronic knowhow who kind of sold their services for higher in all manner of kind of mundane, everyday contexts. You know, the statistics are sort of vague and its hard to know how much we can trust them, but in some sources in the 1950s, as late as the 1970s the sources suggest that there are far more telephones being tapped in the United States for the purpose of litigating civil suits and divorce cases than there were tapped, telephones tapped for the purpose of criminal investigations or Even National security investigations. This was a really surprising idea, this idea that there was robust market for wiretaps and bugs i kind of florist in the great entries of the law for more than a century and is not until 1968 that the federal government kind of turns around and tries to begin to regulate this kind of wild west of the tap and bug trade, as it was called. And even after, this is something unencumbered as well, even after the federal government passes a wiretap act in 1968 which is a think something we should probably talk about why 1968 is a date, was held into law, the larger law that the wiretap act was part of, even after the wiretp act eliminates or renders illegal or prohibits wiretapping on the part of private actors and the private use and sale of electronic surveillance equipment, electronic surveillance equipment doesnt die out in the private kind of corporate quasicorporate arena. And, in fact, flourishes both illegally and also these firms, these electronic firms that were kind of designing these technologies, selling it to private citizens, just turned around and start selling it to the government. In fact, they were doing more business than ever. To a certain extent this is a long way, this is long answer to your question. To a certain extent our fears about corporate surveillance echoing much earlier historical arrangement that the watershed legal revolution around privacy, rather electronic surveillance that occurs in the late 1960s seem to have eliminated for a period of time. Its kind of after 2001 after the rise of the kind of big data economy that those fears tend to start creeping back in again. Yeah, we just touch on a lot of things i really wanted to discuss. First and foremost in the rise of a surveillance industry not just people who conducted but who make it. But for someone to talk about late 1860s, 1970s and that kind of turning point in part because this touches on a hobbyhorse of mine which is you cant talk about the rise and decline of private surveillance and private eyes in particular that talking about nofault divorces. And it disappeared of the need for private investigators to go do that kind of snooping so person could get a divorce. I think the private eye industry is fascinating and the introduction of nofault divorces may be changes a literature around to come changes in the fiction, and it happens around that same time, around that 1960s, 1970s. I. I wanted to talk about that come not just in terms of divorces but the history it turns up in history of wiretapping and surveillance. So ill say so ill answer the question in the miniature and then kind of zoom out. What matthew is referring to, since the audience may be unfamiliar here, prior to the late 1860s 1960s or 1970sr to get a judge to grant you a divorce you need additional fault in the other party. And one really easy way to show fault in the other party is to document infidelity. So in many jurisdictions around the country, until the late 1960s it was entirely legal to hire a privateer to tap your own telephone to see if your partner is carrying on with someone else. As a nofault divorce as is called comes into focus, marriage laws kind of becomes liberalized in the United States. States. Theres less of a need to import a surveillance technician, to come get you out of your jam, so to speak. This is a very, very small slice of a massive revolution in surveillance and privacy law that happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most legal historians see that as the product of a series of Supreme Court decisions that are handed down in the 60s starting with berger versus new york in 1967, also a case in 1967. What i try to do in about is to decentered the Supreme Court cases and show the extent to which they are part of a much broader transformation and american politics, a kind of careening rightward shift towards a politics of law and order. When Congress Passes its landmark crime bill in 1960, the omnibus crime control and safe streets act, which asked historians see it and see it as one of the clear starting point of our modern kind of trento society. One of the primary carceral society. One of the primary points of emphasis on the part of law and order democrats and republicans was to empower Law Enforcement to use electronic surveillance in criminal investigations. This as late as 1966 is a kind of political nonstarter, but after the long hot summer of 1967 after america sort of explodes as a result of the uprisings in detroit and newark and elsewhere, electronic surveillance becomes an important piece of this broader kind of move, a kind of make america whole again through a more punitive Law Enforcement policy. In the literature on both electronic surveillance and also the literature on the rise of the carceral state, neither of these two kind of traditions can be talking to one another. One of the things and try to do in the book such as it is is to bring them together and show just how critical a law and Order Coalition and a critical Law Enforcement priorities on the ground were normalizing electronic surveillance in american lives. Yeah. And let me ask you because with the law and Order Coalition, with the intervention of wiretapping for kind of daily street crimes and petty crimes and the authority of police to do that more willynilly than before comes sidebyside the rise of awareness of wiretapping, comes more fiction about it, would you say thats true . I dont think so. I dont think that that is necessarily a hard and fast rule. One of the things that i was surprised to uncover as i was doing my research is just how much of a perennial concern wiretapping is in the arena of Popular Culture, dating all the way back to the 19th century. So of course there are moments when, you know, theres a kind of explosion of interest and Popular Culture follows. One thinks of of the kind ofe of films that appear in the early 1970s, and 1974 as the kind of watershed year in the watergate year. All films like Francis Ford Coppola was the conversation, all the president s men, all films that feature wiretapping and electronic surveillance as a kind of stock plot device. Yes, thats true but at the same time they kind of public and popular fascination with wiretapping, electronic surveillance far predates that. I was fascinated to undercover dash uncover a kind of sub genre pulp fiction that explodes in the 20th century known as the wire thriller. These are popular kind of novels, Pulp Literature usually directed towards a young audience, male audiences, but the kind of dying literature, dime novels that all featured kind of rogue telegraph professionals and their wiretapping exploits in committing crimes and also solving them. This is an entire kind of sub genre that proliferates just as the telegraph has reached a saturation point and i can just telephone is beginning to kind of come into its own as a public utility. So yes, there is a can of waxing and when of interest over time on the part of Popular Culture and there are some very clear high point but at the same time one of the things i discovered is that that fascination as y old and its also quite perennial. And the list of films, novels, poems, Television Shows that feature wiretapping and electronic surveillance is as a plot device is as long as the day. And i tried to keep on top of all been in my own research and just that its sort of an impossible kind of sisyphean task. One thing i was wondering is if the wax and waning awareness and concern about wiretapping is a feature or a bug in terms of specifically i would assume in terms of government surveillance, in that ive seen in fbi files, the daily worker, the commonest newspaper, i believe from the 1950s when the daily worker had an article saying they believed they were under electronic surveillance, and the fbi, one field office run to another, is this true . Another was a no, but it doesnt hurt that they think that. And i was wondering if youve seen in real time either, you know, in behind the halls of the wire tappers or in the houses of the people who were wiretapped, i kind of awareness of just what the fear of wiretapping could do to a person and whether or not that was helpful sometimes to dissuade people from engaging in political activism, say, or that hurt people because the awareness of admit that they were not using their phones as much . Im not sure i have a great answer to that question. One thing i would say is that certainly when it comes to telephone surveillance, americans got wise to the story pretty quickly. And there are moments when the are kind of clear, a kind of instances of qaeda public panic surrounding telephone surveillance in the 1950s, there were all these kind of popular hosannas about what were called the wiretap jitters. Like edwin had been. Everyone thought the phone was being listened to. At the same time, and here im thinking about the work that ive done an kind of trying to uncover efforts on the part of ordinary americans and also criminals who were the subject of wiretap investigations to kind of push back over time, very early on people stopped using the phone to conduct business. And i think again there are not really hard and fast rules as to when theyre a kind of popular anxiety kind of crop up and when they kind of recede into the background. Does that answer the question . Is a sort of the force of your question, matthew . What exactly are you thinking of . Other specific instances . Not at all. I was wondering like what youve seen in the archive if there was an awareness amongst the people doing the wiretapping, that, that they benefit from an aggrandize repetition, that everybody so is being tapped, if there was a benefit toward law and order politics and keeping people in line and forcing the status quo, that people were thought of the fbi, for instance, on the present. Perhaps. You know, i dont think about uncover anything that way. I mean come on that front. I mean, i did do a lot of work trying to think about and uncover the lies and labors, i call them, of wire tappers themselves. Thats the title of the book, the listeners. I did talk both on and off the record to a lot of people who do this work, both for Law Enforcement and for National Security purposes. And the one kind of thing, kind of refrained came up again and again wasnt necessarily refrain that spoke to the power that they believed that they had either politically or sort of investigative terms, but really just how grueling and boring this form of investigation is. I did a series of interviews with a former Law Enforcement surveillance technician in the state of new jersey, and he over and over again talked about both how effective wiretaps are in prosecuting certain kinds of cases, but also just how dreadful monitoring i live surveillance recording is. Sometimes, you know, youre stuck in the office 24 hours a day kind of waiting for someone to use the telephone. Other times you were sitting in the basement of an Apartment Building kind of listening, and its just dreadful work. Its just drudgery, and are trying to recover a little bit of that in the book. I dont think these individuals saw themselves as having great power or authority, or even, you know, i think that they saw themselves as doing the dirty work, in several respects. Yeah. I would be remiss if i didnt mention that in the chat are links to where you can buy the listeners is will the bryans first book. One they want to ask about his role of private companies, corporations. Going back to telegraph wires all the way through, you know, Bell Telephone and up through at t, companies have had to be complicit and at times have pushed back but theres been a lot of complexity with large corporations getting access to government and sometimes nongovernment surveyors. And i was wondering if you could talk a little about the role that companies have played in that come all the way since the beginning especially in light of the fact that we know that, for instance, nsa surveillance a lot of it that a lot of it would not exist without ongoing collaboration between at t and verizon. At t being the major figure in that relationship. So i i was wondering if you cd talk about that and that i think we had some questions beginning to roll and so i can ask you something from the audience. So this is a really important through line of the book and one of the stories that i really wanted to kind of chase down when i first started the project. I first started the project both out of, this is it years ago now, after uncovering the d. C. Williams tapes but also this is kind of 2014, 2013, 2014, this is the kind of agent edward snowden, the early revelations about the nnsas wiretapping and electronic surveillance programs, and one of the kind of explosive stories in that moment was the extent to which internet companies, corporate conglomerates were so to speak in bed with the government. And i thought to myself, well, where does this come from . And it turns out these relationships are as old as the wires themselves. Western union, in the age of the telegraph, really pushed back on government attempts to both tap telegraph lines and also access messages. But in the age of the telephone, from the beginning as the saying went, ma bell was big brothers handmaiden. And over time the telephone carriers around the country, most importantly the bell system, found it quite beneficial to provide information and also access to kind of infrastructure, the telecommunications infrastructure, for the purpose of Law Enforcement and National Security surveillance. It was in bells interest mostly because it kept them in the good graces of government regulators. That relationship really changes in the 1980s with the breakup of the bell system and with the explosion of new Communications Devices and technologies. In a more competitive telecommunications environment, private Companies Found it far more beneficial to be on the side of the customer and to be sort of proprivacy, and privacy in that sense wasnt kind of, their commitment wasnt the kind of privacy as a civil liberty but instead it was just simply good business. Privacy as a sort of profit minded priority. This all kind of comes to a head in the 1990s when basically the government finds itself in a bind. No longer other Telecommunication Companies willing to do the dirty business of wiretapping electronic surveillance with the authorities, so Congress Needs to step in in a landmark law that a trace in the book, its evolution and its effects in this transformation is whats known as a Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement act of 1994. This is part of the clinton crime control push and basically this is a law that in short order makes it necessary for Telecommunication Companies to make their infrastructures can make their systems surveillance ready. And while the law didnt necessarily cover the internet and Silicon Valley and its relationship to the work of Law Enforcement eavesdropping occurs through and a a different setf legal channels, this law kind of set the political and cultural stage for a norm of what i Call Incorporated assistance, such as that communications companies, internet companies, Corporate America more generally needs to be on the side of Law Enforcement. This transformation really happened in the 1990s. Thank you. Yeah, and so we have one question from the audience which i was wondering myself, which is whether not you done any research into private citizens and their surveillance measures of each other in the smartphone age, and how easy has it become to tap calls, to track each other, to record people . And have to wonder this as well because i think a lot about the modern kind of very nefarious spyware industry and malware in which they mark of the things that you can download onto your spouses phone and you could track with their phone is doing and where they are at any given time, it is seems to have a lot of, a lot of historical precedence in your book and i was wondering if you thought at all about private surveillance in the smartphone area beyond kind of the nsa and what they can do . I think you would probably be able to add to that question, matthew, better i can. I mean, one could, and i think one should, write an entire book on the subject. It didnt take i dont really do much with that come those relationships after come in the kind of smartphone era. The book really stops the extent that it stops wars ever stopped, will ever stop, in 2001. But one thing i would say just offhand is i talk a lot with my students about this, about the own relationship to their phones and whether they fear, or in some cases, welcome both corporate intrusions on their private data and also the intrusions of other, you know, individuals. You cite a sort of more nefarious side to this, but as the surveillance as a surveillance scholarship sometimes theres good sides come sometimes as bad sites. One thing i was astonished to learn from my students, this is last semester, is that they often download tracking software to the own phones so that when they go out on a thursday night, a friday night or saturday night and theyre out and about town, their friends know where they are, and also if theyre out late at night and are catching and uber their friends can follow them home. So in a strange way they have accommodate themselves to this kind of, kind of culture of ubiquitous surveillance built into our phones, built into our hardware. I think its important to see both sides of that relationship. This isnt, of course, dont get me wrong here, im not excusing spyware. Im not like an advocate for it. But i was fascinated to know that it can kind of be repurposed for other uses. And im kind of curious to know more about this. I mean, have you in your own work thought about this sort of stuff . I mean, i know that your work more is that Law Enforcement and i certainly come spyware is definitely a bad thing, but in terms of how a private individual use, there are some context that if they are quite created a novel and i myself was ignorant of them. I mean, i think certainly consent is key, right . Is you are consenting to have your friends know your location or when you plug in the alexa device in your wall, you are knowing that a lot of what you say could be recorded and stored on some server in some amazon server farm or whatever, but you are taking that into consideration and you decided to consent to the surveillance because the tradeoff, the convenience that it supplies is worth it to you. And i think, i think youre absolutely right. Yeah, i think there are ways to build out to benefit you and are ways in which that can be exploited very easily because again to me surveillance is about, its about vulnerability. There are people you can trust without vulnerability. You can trust that your data is sitting safe on amazon server and will not be exploited, or you could not. Yeah, and the last thing i will say about this, consent is the right word. But as the philosopher and scholar Shoshana Zubov integrate work the a to surveillance capitalism has shown, consent itself is a sort of an possible idea. Is there such thing as consent if, you know, if we were would actually read all the legal, the legalese we need to agree to whatever we want to download an app or so on and so forth. Consent is in, i mean, it doesnt exist anymore. I agree i think an interesting story. So it arrived. When you consent to give your geolocation to a weather app, you dont know whether the weather app is selling that geolocation to data brokers and those data brokers could be selling it to the local Police Department and supposedly consented so that the afterlife of your data and eventually it will belong to definitely mocks the water up. Of them like man hours that it would take to actually read the fine print that you agree to every time you download the weather app. It would be thousands and thousands of it would be thousands and thousands of hours. What actually are we consenting to when we click agree, even an active consent, normative or philosophical terms not really sure it is. Question about the metaverse and whether you thought about surveillance and privacy in a Digital World that one day we will enter into. The only thing i can say is i havent. I finished the book a year ago and the metaverse didnt quite exist then or didnt exist in the guise that it did. It fell outside the bounds of the project and i would say that is for future scholars to take up. It is not my bag i would say. I thought i would ask about the change over time, some interesting things i have read and your book will highlight that, people started bringing telephones into their homes it was both a connection but also an invasion in a sense that another person, unknown into tea was invited into your home and anybody could arrive, anyone could call your phone and be in your house, the streets of the city, moved to the suburbs, the expectation of privacy that suddenly upended privacy in the suburbs and we see that increasingly when Walking Around the street at night, one has to perhaps walk past cameras or the change over time from an operator listening in to all of your phone calls as you write about to encrypted phone call apps on your phone. I wonder if you could talk about your observations with persons expectation of privacy and how it is changed over time. My book deals with this at length. I also recommend for folks are interested, the real book on this is the known citizens history of privacy in america, an amazing book that inspired me when it came out in 2018, thankful that sarah blurred the back of my book. Legal scholars and philosophers regard privacy as a negative liberty which is to say that it is an idea, an ideal that the ordinary citizen doesnt think about or worry about or claim to, until it is lost. I think technologies of overtime enabled us, or made visible those feelings of loss, sometimes more than others, theres a certain waxing and waning of attention to these issues over time but one of the things i tried to show in the book is this is harkening back to an earlier portion of the conversation the extent to which privacy even as a negative liberty was far more mainstream kind of political position in the american political calculus in the first half of the 20th century than the second half of the 20th century and the fight over privacy that occurred in an age of proliferating technology in the second half of the 20th century are always seemingly taking place on receding grounds. There are various historical signposts we can turn to in looking at the past and thinking about the negative liberty of privacy is getting felt, it has to do with new technologies and new innovations but i like to see it as a slow burn and i am far more interested in the political and social context of those feelings of loss than their kind of technological kind of i dont know the right word, technological embodiment. We use Technological Advancement to tell a story about our own lives, the loss of control we have politically, socially, culturally, but i dont think they are the only stories that exist and i try to decentered the technological. I dont know if that answers the question or not but all i would say is read sarahs book in addition to reading mine. A question in the chat that brings us home, probably a good place to stop which is we do seem to be in a moment where the pursuit of privacy, we have these municipalities and states passing facial recognition bands, closing Fusion Centers which are these big surveillance apparatus emerge after 9 11, places banning predictive policeing and use of simulators that between yourself own and intercept the signal going to cell phone towers, and in some ways, not a wiretapping but way of bringing information off a persons phone, are we in a moment now where the pendulum is swinging a little bit. It is always there, there are always people at any time fighting for privacy and your report shows there are mainstream political currents and all these things are percolating somewhere. I wonder if you see this as a new watershed moment . It might be. There are a couple historical signposts we can turn to like in the last decade that seem to be swinging the pendulum back towards privacy. Revelations, the cambridge analytical scandals, the concerns about facebook and other social Media Companies and their access to private data so there is certainly awareness, but whether that awareness can get translated into regulations or even meaningful political change im somewhat pessimistic. Im heartened by the work that scholars have done, activists have done concerning new technologies of facial recognition and municipalities doing the dirty work, banning them and leading the way. A lot of this work is happening at the georgetown law center. At the same time, i worry about the receding Playing Field that i alluded to earlier and i worry about the culture of what media scholars call digital resignation. Yes, we are concerned about the more extreme forms of intrusion, technological or otherwise. At the same time giving up our privacy, giving up our information to authorities, to institutions, private, public, is really convenient. That convenience is a Sticking Point going forward. I would like to say i get asked a lot about where the conversation is going at historians like me are not in the business of prognostication but i do think that since the late 1960s of those battles have been taking place on a receding battlefield and whether we can have meaningful change in this current political environment and current ecological environment, i am sorry to end on this note, i am not so sure. A shrinking Playing Field because of our overreliance on punitive politics which seems incredibly entrenched. But i will say that as i like to say all governance is coercion, some coercion is good. We give this data up to these institutions that provide us with services, with convenience. Is it not something we could do to make those institutions more trustworthy so that we dont have to give up the convenience, learn a new way of keeping the data to ourselves and how to do the harder way of doing this but fight to make these institutions we give our data over to just a little bit more trustworthy . I think that is well said and the work you are doing both scholarly and public activist work you do is going a long way toward that. Are much more hopeful note on which to end, i appreciate it. I reckon and everybody pick up a copy of this unbelievable book. It will have a place of honor in my bookshelf and it was great having this conversation with you. Thanks so much, thanks much. So much to think about here that was really fascinating stuff. Thank you, brian, matthew, you were a great interlocutor, a pleasure to have you both with us and look forward to future work by you both and want to thank all of you in the audience for joining us. 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