If these wiretapping scandals sound remarkably similar to the controversies over government surveillance today, that’s because they are. Or at least that’s what Brian Hochman argues in his smart, entertaining, and occasionally alarming new book, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States. As the subtitle alludes to, Hochman narrates a century and a half of wiretapping, from the Civil War to the War on Terror. What emerges is a powerful prehistory of today’s private sector and government surveillance regimes. Hochman reveals the surprising strength of public resistance to all forms of electronic surveillance until the 1960s. And, crucially, he shows how national leaders used the racial backlash politics of the late 1960s to normalize government eavesdropping and build the world we live in today.
As soon as people started communicating over wires, they worried about wiretapping. Just a year after Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph in 1844, his attorney and publicist designed a code to keep messages secret. But it was the Civil War, Hochman argues, that really brought wiretapping into its own.
There were 15,000 miles of telegraph lines by the end of the war, and they were easy to tap. You could simply cut into the cable and attach a copper wire with a receiver at the other end. The hard part was not getting caught. Throughout the war, Union and Confederate wiretappers routinely embarked on dangerous missions behind enemy lines, trying to intercept messages and send their own disinformation. Robert E. Lee’s signal clerk even tapped Ulysses S. Grant’s line in 1864, though the only actionable intelligence the Confederates got from it was info on a shipment of Union beef. The pressures of combat also spurred technological innovation, as military telegraphers developed handheld wiretapping devices the size of a cigarette case. And their exploits soon entered the public mind: The Listeners reproduces a fantastic sketch of a Union soldier tapping a Confederate line from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1865.
Although wiretapping began as a weapon of war, it quickly lost its association with the government. Instead, Hochman contends, it increasingly came to be seen as a tool of crime. In 1864, D.C. Williams became the first American ever convicted for wiretapping, after he tapped business communications on the West Coast and sent the details to stockbrokers in New York. Newspapers called his case a “new chapter in crime,” and by 1874, a string of other wiretapping cases in New York and Washington, D.C., had alerted the public to the dangers of wire crimes.