Surveillance Through the Centuries

A MERICA'S FIRST WIRETAPPING conviction happened in 1864.

- KATRINA GULLIVER

A stockbroker named D.C. WilA liams had been tapping a telegraph line in California to get corporate information, which he used for advantageous stock trades. The law he broke had been passed two years earlier, making California the first state to regulate wiretapping.

The telephone had not been invented yet, and the transcontinental telegraph had only just been completed. The Golden State's legislators were ahead of the game. Ever since then, legislation dealing with electronic surveillance has been playing catch-up-both with the technology and with public sentiment.

In the early days of the telegraph, privacy was a difficult issue to address. It was impossible to expect or demand that only the addressee could see your communication: Operators had to both transmit and receive the messages, and couriers had to deliver them. The same was initially true of the telephone: Calls were connected by an operator, and many subscribers were on party lines. This made legislation hard. Simply "listening" couldn't be forbidden, since many individuals had legitimate reasons to listen or could do so incidentally.

"Eavesdropping was a feature of telephony from the beginning," Georgetown University's Brian Hochman observes in The Listeners, a history of American wiretapping. "Customer privacy was an invented ideal that came later."

Attitudes toward wiretapping evolved too. Soldiers on both sides of the Civil War had engaged extensively in the practice, and newspapers depicted their actions as beneficial, even heroic. But in peacetime, tapping was seen as the province of con men, blackmailers, and other disreputable types.