Towards a history of listening and surveillance

Abstract

This essay seeks to contribute to debates surrounding surveillance, media, and security cultures by exploring the intersection of surveillance and listening. Throughout the essay, examples from the United States and Australia illustrate the overlap between popular media, policy, and surveillance. It argues that popular media can show us how secret listening is socialized. It uses the series ‘eavesdropping – tapping – bugging – interception’ as a framework to identify continuities and discontinuities in how surveillance has engaged listening.

Notes

1. In the majority of ‘reality’ programs cameras are an integral part of the participants’ performances. John Corner (1999, 261) has described a process ‘selving’ in Big Brother where a ‘true’ self is seen to emerge through a publicly performed identity. Other programmes, such as Punk'd and Prank Patrol, play with the effect that secret recording exposés allow.

2. Simmel (1906) draws an interesting parallel between limits in public life, privacy, and surveillance: ‘In general men credit themselves with the right to know everything which, without application of external illegal means, through purely psychological observation, it is possible to ascertain. In point of fact however, indiscretion exercised in this way may be quite as violent and morally quite as unjustifiable as listening at keyholes and prying into the letter of strangers’ (455–6). For analysis arguing for the positivity of secrecy, see Bratich (2006).

3. For a description of an early telephone recording machine see ‘Recording and the making of a “Surveillance Society”’. http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/surveillance2.php.

4. Furthermore, during Prohibition illegal alcohol smugglers used shortwave radio to organize their activities. Vacuum tubes made smaller transmitters possible and clandestine radio stations spread quickly in the US (Mowry 2001, 1–2). International smuggling operations led to coordinated monitoring by a number of agencies (Customs, Navy, Police). This was the precursor to new agencies that oversaw the extension of mass surveillance after the Second World War.

5. The ban in broadcasting recorded telephone conversations incensed Australian commercial radio stations that were trying to combat television's audience pull (TV was introduced in 1956). Despite it being illegal to broadcast any substantial portion of a telephone conversation they continued to use telephone recordings. A confrontation between authorities and radio broadcasters was avoided by the introduction of technology that allowed radio stations to delay ‘live’ broadcasting by a number of seconds (seven were mandated) so a producer could intervene and dump indecorous comments before they were broadcast. For pre-recorded broadcast calls a sound pulse could be heard on the line to let callers know they were being taped.

6. It should be noted that arrested men were convicted of being, for some period, part of a group which ‘was directly or indirectly engaged in preparing or fostering the doing of a terrorist act’ (Bongiorno 2009, 10). It was not necessary for any action to have been planned or target to have been identified; all they had to do was to have discussed actions as a group.