Virtual reading series that follows in the footsteps of our inner circle during the time of the pandemic. A big shout out and welcome all of our cspan viewers joining us tonight. As always, we are beaming to you. The unceded ancestral grounds of the remedy peoples, also known as San Francisco bay area, from where we to celebrate the works of authors we know and love with readings, discussions and forums. Tonight, it is a pleasure to have with us Brian Hartman celebrating the publication. His new book titled the listeners a history of wiretapping in the United States. Brian hochman is director of american studies and associate of english at georgetown university. Hes the author of the book savage preservation the ethnographic of modern media technology, which was a finalist for the american studies association, wins laura romero prize for first best first book. His academic writings of a period in American Literature africanamerican review, hallelu notes and queries as well as many other journals. His research and Electronics Surveillance has been featured in history. The Smithsonian Magazine and the washington post. Joining him tonight in conversation is matthew goglia. Matthew goglia is a political and currently serves as an affiliated scholar in the institute of criminal justice at the university of california Hastings School of law. He researches the history of u. S. Policing and is a policy for surveillance and privacy at the Electronic Frontier foundation. He is the coeditor of the essential Commission Report and his have appeared in nbc news, the washington post, slate motherboard and the freedom information centered outlet. Mark rock he serves as an editor of disciplining the city, a series on the urban and the history, urban, policing and incarceration at the urban history associations blog, the metropole. So please join us now in giving a warm welcome to Brian Hartman and matthew goglia. Gentlemen, welcome to city lights. Thanks so much, peter. I want to start by thanking lights for invite me. I want to thank my publicist at Harvard University press. Amanda, for arranging this and also i want to thank my interlocutor this evening, Matthew Quigley here. Its really exciting to 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 over to matthew and we get our conversation started. 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. Im also going to talk a little bit, a little bit more informally about the broader stakes of the project. Just to set the stage for the conversation, talk a little bit about the main arguments that i in the book and then were hoping after we talk for 45 minutes or so to open the virtual floor for whatever questions folks in the audience have. So without further ado, ill share what i call the ballad of dc williams. Dc williams work the trading desk at a small Investor Firm in placerville, california, about 45 miles east of sac. He spent his days doing what most everyone in the financial does for a living. He studied trends and he made deals. He bought low and he sold. He kept a close eye all the while on the regular movements of the market. Williams also had a knack electronics and a specialized Technical Skills helped him to pick up a second job that involved wiretapping. For this job sometimes went by the names franklin or dc hannahs. It depended on what sort of work was required over the span of a short few months. Williams gained notoriety across the state of california by devising scheme that allowed him to do both jobs trading stocks and tapping wires. At the same, 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 in nearby san hoping to intercept news of a price quote, a Patent Application or an impending sale. Anything that a corporate entity consider a confidential williams would then relay the news to a syndicate of stockbrokers posted in locations as far flung as new york and virginia. The brokers made Financial Moves based the intercepted information returning cut of the profits to placerville, the genius of the wasnt simply that it allowed to eavesdrop on privileged communications. It also capitalized the time it takes to send an electronic signal across a region as vast that of the continental United States. A short period of time, but a period of time. Nonetheless, after bribing a few wellconnected officials found a way to transmit the contents of his wiretaps while slowing the speed with which the original corporate messages reached their intended destiny. Is brokers could buy and sell stocks moments before anyone else taking. Advantage of illegal tips. All appearing to go along with the of the market. The arrangement proved lucrative. Williamss correspondence later produced as evidence in court revealed that the members of his syndicate made a small fortune. While wiretapping scam was up and running, but everything came crashing when an anonymous tip put the authorities onto williamss 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 interception of electronic messages. Reporters covering the case pronounced it a, quote, new chapter in crime. A reminder that advances Communications Almost always advances in eavesdrop in the year. And heres the twist to the story was 1864 dc 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, from the age of dc williams to the very near present. And the books central storyline, how it is wiretapping transforms from a business so called with criminals like dc williams to an acceptable Law Enforcement tactic used widely in the investigation of crime and the protection of National Security. Off the bat ill say that this is not the book i expected to write when i started out on project eight years ago. I envisioned myself telling a story about spies lies and secrets, a story that probed the recesses of the past and exposed the history that had been long hidden in the archives. Instead, as i worked through the sources, the story that i uncovered was a much more public and a much more prosaic. In the end, a story about tap telephones in, civil suits and divorce cases. A story about bugging devices in boardrooms and labor union meetings. And finally, i think most importantly, a story about surveillance techniques in, the hands of the police. The entity that turns out to have most used and abused electronic surveillance over time. And the characters who turned out to be critical to this more public and prosaic story werent spies and saboteurs working for Shadowy Government institutions. They were instead private investigators and police detectives, bootleggers, mobsters, con men, adulterers and Civil Liberties activists, politicians, and even stars. These were the people behind the wiretaps. Public face. Its prosaic face. And the book that ive written tries outline for a very broad reading audience the sinister and i think somewhat surprising world that these individuals made. The last thing ill say before turning it 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, law and order, politics that helped to normalize practice of wiretapping in america. It turns out that state and federal agencies like the fbi, the cia, can relax heavily late to the wiretap. And it was only in the aftermath of a nationwide panic over race and street crime in 1960s, a full century after the invention of the wiretap that lawmakers in washington finally found a way to institutional the governments wiretap authority. This is actually something that they had been trying to do. For decades, for several decades. 40 years. I want to underscore that within the field of surveillance, also within the field of american history, the history of technology, this is something of a counterintuitive or even, i think, heretical argument, a above all, it situates the project of electronic surveillance in america not as a kind of knee jerk response to public fears about communism or terrorism or other kind of threats to the domestic order. But instead, it situates it as a of gradual accommodation to the political priorities and also the Law Enforcement imperatives that have helped to build the modern carceral state. Moving back in time, it was the war on drugs and before it, the war on alcohol. During prohibition that helped to turn the wiretap into an acceptable investigative tool. And i think we still live the consequences those historical and political relationships. We still love those today. And i think this is probably, i imagine, a matter that will come up in our conversation here this evening. So with that, ill turn it over to you. Thank you. Yeah. This is one heck of a book. I really enjoyed it. One thing that 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 its a its a political history of knowledge in many ways. It is a story of who can acquire knowledge, how they can get it, and especially how knowledge can then make a person vulnerable. It is the political, the empowered life of knowledge. Im very interested in in my scholarship, thinking about surveillance and in that way we learned that these struggles are not new. That rendering a person vulnerable by acquiring knowledge about them through surveillance, this manner, through wiretapping, is a tale old as wires themselves a way. And one of the things i wanted to begin talking about was this incredible phrase that you use right after your of dc williams, which is historical, which is feeling of when you when you find something in the archive, when you read something in history that happened 100, 150 years ago that seemed so reminiscent and so. An echo of conversations that having now that you wonder if anything at has changed and if so how its changed. And so there were a number of times in this book i had historical vertigo thinking the people who got selling this technology to police, thinking about the rubber stamping of surveillance and wondering just how tenacious judges would be allowing or disallowing different types of surveillance. Even you know, just last week, a story emerged about how immigrations and Customs Enforcement have been sending overly broad subpoenas to western for bulk Financial Data of people in the southwest, money back and forth between 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 of historic. So i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about finding these stories in the archive, experiencing that for the first time and, and reflecting on what significance has what does that mean for us now, these histories and still trying to find surveillance in 2021. No, i do. I do. Excuse me. What is time anymore anymore . Thats a fantastic. And i think the 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 cant upon stumbled upon the story of dc williams and was astonished that it took place in the 1860s. He was prosecuted a law passed in the state of california the first wiretap law in the United States in the. 1862. And i was kind of gobsmacked. I didnt know wire tapping went back that far and the kind of starting point for the project was simply to ask myself, one why does it go back far . And why dont i know that . Why do we continually think of these problems, problems of knowledge, as you say, problems . You know, sometimes we call them problems of privacy. But its also i think i like your framing of it as problems of knowledge, problems of technology and power. Why do we constantly think about them as new and novel . Why do we constantly encounter afresh with kind of fresh outrage every theres a new revelation. I think theres a certain sense i mean, part of me thinks historical vertigo suggests that not much has changed over time. These are very old problems. And thats a kind of dispiriting feeling. The relationships that the kind of story of dc williams reveals seems. So kind of modern, so it kind of suggests that these relationships are kind of intractable. Theyre a part of our Communications Ecosystem and theres nothing we can do to eradicate them or kind of push back against. But one of the other through lines that, i try to highlight the book is the extent to which actually americans have pushed back against this problem of knowledge gathering information and 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. I talk about century and in time ordinary americans politicians of various political stripes pushed against the increase. Agents of government and technology and i think that thats also that marks a kind of change over time even as much as these problems and perennial even as much as were constantly these vertiginous. Kind of historical cases. Americans have back and in fact a commitment to privacy and civil rights and Civil Liberties was far more mainstream in american life, in the 1960s, the 1950s, 1940s than it certainly is today. And one of the things that i try to do in the book is to uncover that change over time, even as much as im sketching some broad continuities then and now. Yeah, and i think youre absolutely right identifying that change over time. And i think you nailed it. Spot on and identify peoples, peoples willingness to put up with government surveillance, or at least that becoming slowly normalized and the norm over time with the rise of the carceral state that even the way that police perhaps behave now at least in some communities obviously theres a great continuity of police violence, specifically in black and immigrant. But the way that police behave now, the way that they deploy surveillance now are probably ways it makes me think reading your book that would have been so tolerated but but for this fear of crime and the willingness to throw military equipment, surveil once whatever it is at at street crime, at petty crime, with know war on drugs, war, crime, broken windows, policing all the way forward. So im glad that you identify that. And i totally agree. One thing i wonder about is, though the is nongovernmental surveillance and i am really that your book touches that because at least today when when people are worried about their passwords being compromised when they worry, you know, what could happen, their phones a lot of concern isnt about police. Its often about dubious actors about hackers, ransomware. Its about, you know, people getting hold of your account and extracting whatever information from it. And you are really kind of, i think, tell the long history of of your information being rendered vulnerable not just to the state, but to other people who would use that information badly as well as really, if you could talk a little bit about that and, you know, whether or not you see that as kind of a departure from the existing literature on surveillance, obviously, you know, josh lauer just had this great book, corporate surveillance of corporate data collection. You know oftentimes for kind of marketing and advertising purposes, i was wondering if you could talk a little about nongovernmental surveillance. Theres a certain extent to which the the kind of knee jerk associations that we have now with surveillance and Corporate Culture or what scholars would now call surveillance capitalism. Weve kind of boomeranged ourselves back to a much earlier phase of really prior to the. Late 1960s, early 1970s. And this was something that was really surprising to me in researching this book, the ordinary american far more was was far more afraid, their phone being tapped or far more outraged with the idea of of their phone being tapped, not the federal government by the fbi or the cia, but by private actors or what were called in the 1950s, private years, kind of rogue, private investigators, electronic knowhow, who kind of sold their for hire in 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 1960s, as late as the 1970s, the sources suggest that there are far more telephones being tapped in the United States for for the purpose of litigating civil suits and divorce cases than there were for tap tapped for the purpose of criminal investigations or even security investigations. And this was a really surprising idea, this idea that there was robust mark for wiretaps and bonds that kind of flourished in the gray of the law for for more than a century. And its not until 1968 that the federal government kind of turns around and tries to begin regulate this kind of wild west of the tap and book trade. It was called. And even after and this is something that i uncovered as. Well, even after the federal government passes the wiretap act in 1968, which is, i think, something that we should probably talk about, why in 1968 is the date, what is held, the law, the larger that the wiretap act is part of, even after the wiretap