Booksellers and publishers and the city lights foundation, id like to welcome you to our 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 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. The private kind of corporate quasi corporate arena. And in fact flourishes both illegally and also these firms, these electronic firms that were kind of designing this these technologies selling it to citizens just turned around and started selling it to the and in fact, they were doing more business than ever. So to a certain extent, this is a long way. It is a long answer to your question. To a certain extent, our fears about corporate surveillance echo a much earlier historical arrangement. The watershed legal revolution in around privacy, around electronic that occurs in late 1960s seemed to have eliminated for a period of time. And 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 want to discuss, first and foremost, being the rise of a a surveillance industry, not just the people who conduct it when the people who make the. But first, i want to talk about a little bit late 1960s, 19, 1970s and that kind of turning point in because this touches on a hobbyhorse of mine, which is that you cant talk about the rise and decline of private surveillance and private eyes in particular talking about no fault divorces and the the disappearance of the need for private investigators to go do kind of snooping, could get a divorce and and yeah, i mean i think the private eye industry is its fascinating and it you know, the introduction of fault divorces it changes the literature around it. It changes the fiction. And and it around that same time around that that 1960s, early 1970s period. So i wonder you could talk a little bit about that turning point, not just in terms of of divorces, the history of marriage. Yeah. In terms of in the history of of wiretapping and surveillance. So ill say so there are a couple to answer the question in miniature. And then kind of zoom out. So what matthew is referring to since the audience may be unfamiliar here prior the late 1960s, early 1970s, in to get a judge to grant you a divorce, you needed to show 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 private year to tap your own telephone to see if your partner is carrying on with someone else. Once the kind of no fault divorce, as its called, that comes into focus. Marriage laws kind of become liberalized, as in the United States, theres less of a need to employ a surveillance technician to kind of get you out of your jam, so to speak. This is a very small slice of a massive reveal abortion in surveillance in private c law that happens in late 1960s and early 1970s. Most legal historians see that as the product of a series of supreme decisions that are handed down in the sixties, starting with burger v york in 1967. So katz of the United States is the canonical case 1967. What what i to do in the book is to dissenter the Supreme Court cases and show the extent to which theyre a part of a much broader transformation in american politics, a kind of careening rightward shift towards, a politics of law and order, when congress, its landmark crime bill in 1968, the omnibus crime control and safe streets act, which is as historians see it as one of the clear starting points of our modern kind of carceral society, one of the primary kind of points of emphasis on the part of law and order and republican ends was to empower Law Enforcement to use electronic surveillance in criminal investigations. This as late as 1966 is a kind of political. But after the long, hot summer of 1967 after america sort explodes as a result of, the uprisings in detroit and newark and elsewhere, electronic surveillance an important piece of this broader kind of move to to a kind of make america whole again through a more punitive Law Enforcement policy and in the literature on the both electronic surveillance and also the literature on the rise of the carceral state, neither of these two kind of historiography traditions seem to be talking to one another, one of the things that im trying to do in the book, such as it is, is to bring them together and show just how critical the law and Order Coalition and how critical all Law Enforcement priorities on the ground were to normalizing electronics in american lives. Yeah, let me ask you, because with the law and Order Coalition, with the the enter into the intervention of wiretapping for of daily street crimes and petty crimes and and the authority of police to do that more willy nilly than before comes side by side the rise of awareness of wiretapping becomes more fiction about it becomes would you say thats true im. I dont think so i dont think that thats 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 wiretap even is in the arena of Popular Culture, dating all the way back to the 19th century. So of course there are moments, you know, theres a kind of explosion of interest and Popular Culture follows. I mean, one thinks of the kind of spate of films that appear in early 1970s and 1974 as a kind of watershed year. And the watergate year. All films like Francis Ford Coppolas the conversation. Alan pakulas, 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, the kind of public and popular with wiretapping, electronic surveillance, far predates that. I was fascinated to uncover a kind of subgenre of pulp fiction that kind of explodes in the early century, known as the wire thriller. These are popular of novels. Pulp literature usually directed towards young male audiences, but kind of dime dime, dime novels that all featured kind of rogue professionals and their wiretapping exploits and committing crimes and also solving them. This is an entire kind of subgenre that proliferates just as the telegraph has reached saturation point as point and just as the telephone is beginning kind of come its own as a public utility. So yes, there is kind of waxing and waning of interest over on the part of Popular Culture and there are some very clear high points. But at the same time, one of the things that i discovered is that that fascination is very old and its also quite perennial. And the list of films, poems, Television Shows that feature wiretapping, electronic surveillance is a plot device is long as the day and ive tried to keep on top of of them in my own research and just found its a sort of an impossible kind of sisyphean task. One thing i was wondering is if the the wax and waning of awareness and concern about wiretapping is is a feature or a bug in terms of specifically would assume in terms of government surveillance in that, you know ive seen in in fbi files for like that of the daily worker the communist newspaper, i believe the 1950s, where the daily worker had an article saying that they believed they were under electronic surveillance. And the fbi won field Office Running to another. Is this true . And the other one saying no, but it doesnt hurt that they think that and i was wondering if if youve seen in real time either you know in the behind halls of the wire tappers or in the houses of the people who were wiretapped, a kind of awareness of just what the fear of could do to a person and whether or not that was helpful to dissuade people from engaging in political activism, say, or that hurt people because the awareness of it meant that people using their phones as much. Im not sure i have a great answer to that question. And one thing id say is that certainly when it comes telephone surveillance. Americans got wise to the story pretty quickly. And there are moments when there are kind of clear. Kind of instances of of public panic surrounding a telephone surveillance in the 1950s. There were all these kind of popular hosannas about what were called the wiretap jitters. Like everyone had them. Everyone thought their phone was was being listened to, but at the same time and here im thinking about the work that ive done and kind trying to uncover efforts on the part of ordinary americans and also criminals who are the subject of of wiretap investigations to kind of push back over time very on people stopped the phone to conduct business and its i think there again there arent really hardened fast rules as to when there are kind of popular anxiety these kind of crop up and when kind of recede into the background. Does that answer the question is that sort of of course your question matthew or. Yeah, what exactly are you thinking of . Like are there specific instances . Oh, no, no, no. I mean, not at all. I mean, i was just wondering what youve seen in the archive if there was an aware amongst the people doing the wiretapping that that they benefit from the aggrandize reputation, given that everybodys phone is being tapped. If there was a benefit, you know, law and order, politics and and keeping people in line and forcing the status quo that, people were sort of the fbi, for instance, omnipresent, perhaps, you know i, i hadnt really i dont think i really uncovered anything that way. I mean on that front, i mean i did do a lot of work trying to think about and uncover the lives and and call them of wiretaps themselves. Thats title of the book. The listeners i talk both on and off the record to. A lot of people who do this work, both for Law Enforcement and for, you know, National Security purposes and this the one kind of thing kind of reframed came up again and wasnt necessarily refrain spoke to the power that they believe that they had either or sort of in sort of investigative, but really just how grueling and boring this form of of investigation is 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 dreadful monitoring a live surveillance, recording is sometimes, you know, youre stuck in the office 24 hours a day, kind, waiting for someone to use the telephone. Other times, you know, youre sitting in the basement of an Apartment Building kind of listening and its just dreadful work. Its just drudgery and i try 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 doing the dirty work in several respects. Yeah i should, i would be remiss if i did not mention in the chat our links to where you can buy the listeners as well as brians book. One thing i wanted to ask you about is, is role of private companies is because, you know, 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 there has been a lot of complicity over with large corporations giving access to government and sometimes nongun surveyors. And i was wondering if you could talk little bit about the role that companies have played that all the way since the beginning, especially in light of the fact we know that, you know, for instance, nsas surveillance, a lot of it would not without ongoing collaboration between at t and verizon. I mean at t being the the major figure in that relationship. So i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the absence of that and then i think we have some questions beginning to roll. So i can ask you something from the audience so this is a really important throughline in 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 of the you know, this is eight years ago now, after uncovering the dc williams case, but also, you know, this is kind of 2014, 2013, 2014. This is the kind of age edward snowden, the early revelation, evidence about the nsas wiretapping and electronic surveillance programs. And one of the kind of explosive stories in that moment was the extent to which which internet, 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 relations ships are as old. 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 handmade and over. The telephone carriers around the country. Importantly the bell system found it quite beneficial to. Provide information also access to kind of infrastructure, Telecommunications Infrastructure for the purpose 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 changes in the 1980s with the break up of the bell system and with the explosion of Communications Devices and technologies in a more competitive Telecommunications Environment and private Companies Found it far more beneficial to be on the side of the customer and to be sort of pro privacy and privacy. That sense wasnt there commitment wasnt the kind of privacy as a civil of liberty, but instead it was just simply Good Business privacy as a sort of profit minded priority priority. This all kind of comes to a head in the 1990s when basically the government finds itself in a bind. No longer are the Telecommunications Companies willing to do the dirty business of wiretapping electronic surveillance with, the authorities. So Congress Needs to step in in a law that i trace the book, its and its effects in this transformation is known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement act of 1994. This is part of clinton crime control push. And basically this is the law that in short order makes it necessary Telecommunications Companies to make their infrastructures make their systems surveillance ready. And while the law necessarily cover the internet and Silicon Valley and its relationship to the work of Law Enforcement eavesdropping by occurs through a kind of different set of legal channels. This law of set the political cultural stage for a norm of what i Call Incorporated assistance such that communications companies, internet companies, Corporate America more generally needs to be on the side of Law Enforcement. This transformation really happens in the 1990s. Thank you yeah and so we a one question in the audience which i was myself which is whether not youve done any research into private citizens and their surveillance measures each other in the smartphone age and how how easy it has it become to to tap calls to track each other, to record people. And i have to wonder this. Well, because i, i think a lot about the modern kind of very nefarious spyware industry and malware in which, you know they market these things that you can download it onto your spouses phone and you could track their phone is doing and where they are at any time and it seems to have a lot of a lot of historical precedents in in your book. And i was wondering if you had thought at all about private in the smartphone era beyond kind of the nsa and what they can do. I think youd probably be able to answer that question, matthew better than than i can. I mean thats i mean at i mean one good and i think one should write an entire book on the subject and. I didnt really i dont really deal much with that those relationships after in the kind of smartphone era the book really stops to the extent that it stops or has ever stopped, will ever stop in 2001. But one thing id say just offhand, i talk a lot with my students about this, about their own relationship to their phones and whether they fear or in some cases, welcome both corporate intrusions, 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 surveillance studies scholars have shown, surveillance is often janice faced sometimes theres good sides. Theres bad sides. And one thing that i was astonished to learn from my students this last semester is that they often download tracking software to their own phones, so that when they go out on a thursday night, a friday night or a saturday night, and theyre out about town. Their friends know they are. And also, if theyre out late night and theyre catching an uber, their friends can follow them home. So in a strange way way, they have accommodated themselves to this kind of kind of culture of ubiquitous surveillance built into our phones, built into our hardware. And i think its important see both sides of that relationship. This isnt of course, dont get me wrong here. Im not excusing, you know, spyware. Im not like advocate for it. But i was fascinated to know that it can kind of repurposed for other uses. 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 about Law Enforcement and. Id certainly you know, spyware is a definitely a bad thing. But in terms of how private individuals it, there are some context that i think are quite creative and novel. And i myself was ignorant of them. Yeah. I mean, i think certainly is key, right . Is is you are consenting to have your friends know your location, you know when you plug in the alexa device into your wall you you are knowing that a lot of what you say could recorded and stored on some server in some amazon server farm or whatever but you are you are that into consideration and you have to consent to that surveillance the tradeoff the convenience that it supplies is worth to you and i think thats think youre absolutely right. Yeah think there is there are ways to to build that out to benefit you and there are ways in which that can be exploited very easily. Again its thought to me that surveillance is about its about vulnerability. And there there are people you can trust with that vulnerability. You can trust that your data is sitting on an amazon server and will not be exploited, or you could not use. Yeah, and the last thing id say about this, i mean, consent is the right word. But as the philosopher and scholar shoshana, zuboff and her great work the age of surveillance capitalism has shown consent itself is a sort of impossible idea. Is there such a thing as consent if you know, if you know, we would actually read all of the legal, you know, the legalese that we need to agree to whenever we want to download app or so on and so forth. Consent is isnt as i mean it, it doesnt exist anymore. But i agree. I think i think it is interesting story to follow. Yeah. And i mean and youre youre absolutely right. I mean, when you consent to give your geo location to a weather, what you dont know is that that weather app is instead selling that geo location and to data brokers and those data could be selling it to the local police department. And because they have supposedly consented, you know, so that the afterlives of your data and who eventually it will belong to definitely mucks the water up of and legal legal scholars have done work in this area and as i understand it like the 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 hours so like what actually are we consenting to when we click agree is that even an act of consent in kind of normative almost like philosophical terms. Im not really sure it is. Okay, we have a question here about the metaverse and whether or not youve thought about surveillance, oversight and privacy in a fully world that perhaps one day we will enter or not as the case. I the only thing i can say is i havent i finished the book about a year ago and the metaverse i mean didnt quite exist or at least didnt exist in the guise that it. So it fell. Unfortunately the bounds of project and i would say that thats for future scholars to take up its not my bag i would say i guess were really kind of nearing the end time i thought i would ask you about the the change over time or perhaps not in the expertise of privacy. You know, theres some really interesting things ive read and, you know, your book really cannot be highlighted for me about, you know, when when people bringing telephones into their homes, it was both a connection, but also a kind of invasion in the sense another person, an unknown, was invited into your home and anybody could arrive an entity that anybody in the world could call your phone and suddenly kind of be your house. And then especially for people who had escaped the kind of surveillance the streets of the cities and moved to the suburbs, there was an expectation of privacy that suddenly this kind of upended privacy in the suburbs and, we see that now increasingly when, you know, Walking Around a street at night one has to perhaps walk past ten or 15 ring cameras or the change over time from an operator in to all of your phone calls as you write about to now having like encrypted phone call apps on your phone. So i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about share your observations with the persons expectation of privacy and how its changed over time. So. My book deals with, i think, length. Id also recommend for folks who are interested in sense subjects the real book on this is sarah argos fantastic study the non citizen, which is a history of privacy in america its just an amazing book that really inspired me when it came out and 2018 and i was thankful that sarah blurbed the back of my book. Legal scholars, philosophers regard privacy as a negative liberty, which is to say that its an idea, an ideal that the ordinary citizen doesnt think about to worry about or cling to until its lost. I think new technologies have over time. Enabled us or made visible those feelings of loss. Sometimes more than others. Again, theres a sort of waxing and waning of attention to these issues over time. But one of the things that i tried to show in the book is i think again and this is harkening back to an earlier portion of, our conversation, the extent to which privacy, even a negative liberty was form a far more kind of mainstream kind of political position in the american political calculus, in the first half of the 20th century than it was in the second half of the 20th century. And the fights over privacy that occur in an age of proliferating technologies in the second half of the 20th century are, always seemingly taking place on receding ground. There are various historical that we can turn to in looking at the past and kind of thinking about like when it is that the negative liberty of privacy is getting felt increasingly, oftentimes, again, it has to do with technologies new innovations. But i like to it more as a kind of slow burn. And im far more interested in the people cynical and kind of social context of those feelings of loss than theyre a kind of technological. Kind of i dont know what the right word here. Then in their sort of technological embodiment, i think at times we sort of use technological to tell a story about our own lives, about feelings of loss of control that we have politically, socially, culturally, but i dont think that there the only story that exists and i try to kind of dissenter the technological in the narrative that tell im not sure if that answers the question or not but all i would say is read sarah igers book in addition to possibly my mind, i was very jealous of that blurb. I have to admit we have a question in the in the chat that that i think kind of brings us home and is probably good place to stop, which is do seem to be in a moment where the pursuit of privacy is on the ascent. We have all these municipalities and states passing facial recognition bans, trying to close fusion centers. Are these kind of big surveillance apparatus that emerge after 911 . You know, places banning policing, places banning the use of cell site simulators, these kind of devices that ping your cell phone and kind of intercept the signal to cell phone towers, i guess kind of in some ways not a wiretapping, but a way of gleaning information off a persons phone are we in a moment now where where were were swing the pendulum is swinging a little bit obviously its always kind of its always there. You know, there are always people at any given time period fighting for privacy. And i think your book shows that, you know, there there are mainstream political currents, but also all of these things are always percolating somewhere. And so i wonder if you if you see this as being a kind of a new watershed moment, i think it be a there are a couple of kind of historical signposts we can turn to like in the last decade that to be, as you say, swinging the pendulum back towards privacy, the snowden revelations that kind of cambridge scandals, the concerns about facebook and other social Media Companies and their access to our private data. So theres certainly awareness whether that awareness can get translated into regulations or even meaningful political change. I am somewhat i mean, im certainly heartened by, you know, the work that scholars have done, activists have done surrounding say that the new technologies of facial recognition and municipalities municipalities, as you say, have been doing the dirty work and kind of, you know, banning and kind of leading the way. A lot of this work, coincidentally is happening at the Georgetown Law Center across town in d. C. At the same, i worry that receding Playing Field that i alluded to earlier, and i worry about the culture of what media scholars call, digital resignation. Yes, i think we are about these more forms of intrusion, technological or otherwise. At the same time, giving up our privacy, giving our information to authorities to institutions, private, public is really convenient and that convenience, i think, is going to be a point going forward. I like to say i get asked a lot about like where the conversations going and historians like me are not in the business of prognostication, but i do think that really since the late 1960s that those battles have been taking place on a receding battlefield and whether we can have change in current political environment in this current technological environment, im sorry to say, and sorry to end on this note, im not so sure. Yeah. I mean, certainly a shrinking Playing Field, both because our overreliance on a very punitive law or politics seems incredibly entrenched. Yeah, but but you know, i will say that, you know, as i like to say, all governance is, coercion, some coercion is good. Right . Its like we give this data up to these institutions are they provide us with services that provide us with convenience. Is it not something that we could do to focus on making those institutions just more trustworthy so that we dont have to give up the convenience . Maybe we dont have to, like, learn a new way of of keeping that data to ourselves and, learn how to do the harder way of doing things, or just fight to make these institutions that we willingly give our data over to just, just a little bit more trustworthy. I think thats well said. And i think that the work that youre doing both scholarly and the sort of public activist that you do, is i think going a long way toward that. Thats a much more hopeful note on which to end what i appreciate thank you, i certainly recommend everybody pick up a copy of this unbelievable. It will have a place of honor on my bookshelf now and it was great having this conversation with you. Thanks so much, matthew. Thanks much, peter. So much to think here. But that was really fascinating stuff. Thank you, matthew. Youre a great interlocutor. Such a pleasure to have you both with us here tonight. And really look forward to future work by both. Also want to thank all of you in the audience for joining us. Our event has been made possible by the city lights foundation, continuing the legacy, our founder, lawrence ferlinghetti, into the future public events, our programing in publishing and Educational Outreach all dedicated to