Portable recording technologies and computing began to sound alarms, as their capabilities elicited new threats to privacy rights. Such worries were amplified by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Earl Warren stated in a 1963 opinion regarding recording devices and entrapment: “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.” In addition, a wave of writing by scholars and journalists at this time, focused on technology, privacy, and personal autonomy, helped inform public debate. In many ways this work anticipated current anxieties about the price of life under Big Tech.
Vance Packard’s “The Naked Society” (1964), Alan F. Westin’s “Privacy and Freedom” (1967), and Arthur Miller’s “The Assault on Privacy” (1971) were among the most influential in this genre. Miller understood then that the time would soon come when “our primary source of knowledge will be electronic information nodes or communications centers located in our homes, schools, and offices that are connected to international, national, regional, and local computer-based data networks.” Westin evoked many present-day issues in his wide-ranging, foundational book, paying great attention to “data surveillance” and how new technologies were affecting norms of privacy in order to recuperate this “cornerstone of the American system of liberty.” He viewed privacy and freedom as inextricably linked, defining privacy as “the claim of individuals … to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” “Privacy and Freedom” is still useful today for thinking about the malleable parameters of privacy, and its power in defining an individual’s relationship to the state.
This was the context in which President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a federally controlled data center called the National Data Bank in 1965 as part of the Great Society project. The data center was imagined as a tool for efficiency and organization that would consolidate federal databases at the dawn of computerized record-keeping. However, concerns about technology and privacy were becoming widespread enough that a congressional Special Subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy was established in the House of Representatives. Four separate hearings were held in the House and Senate between 1966 and 1967 to discuss the threats to privacy posed by the computer and the government control of data. They were dominated by overwhelming expressions of concern about the sanctity of individual privacy and civil liberties. The government’s power combined with the yet-unknown capabilities of digital technology were positioned as the main potential threat. The determination that the public needed to be protected from the centralized state collection of data above all else, without sufficient attention to the dangers lurking elsewhere, was a defining moment for cloud policy that has only grown more consequential over the decades that followed.