Insidious Invasions of Privacy



Washington, District of Columbia, USA---“Despite the protection against invasion of privacy afforded by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, bugging is so shockingly widespread and so increasingly insidious that no one can be certain any longer that his home is his castle---free of intrusion,” the magazine article said.

“The government has been electronically spying on its citizens for years. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, has admitted bugging public and private phones and even rooms where IRS auditors called businessmen for questioning, on the theory they might reveal something when IRS men left the room,” it continued.

“…How to safeguard individual rights in a world suddenly turned into a peephole and listening post has become the toughest, trickiest legal problem facing the U.S. today,” the article said.

I’ve been on the road for over 100 days on my Coast to Coast adventure and I am now in the country’s capital city: Washington, DC and everything about it feels so powerful. It’s been years since I made frequent trips here to see a friend and knew the Metro like the back of my hand, but here I am, driving the streets in MY vehicle, thinking things like, “Oh look, there’s the Pentagon.”

And since it’s been nearly four months that I’ve been away, I have not watched the news on a regular or frequent basis. I’ll catch NPR when driving and when it’s available. But with five to eight hour drives as the average between friends, the radio station constantly fades out. There is an ignorant bliss about not knowing what’s going on in the world some times. I do miss it, but still after three years away from the 26 years of working around a newsroom, it just feels good to have my mind on other things.

But in and out of this trip has been the reoccurring subject of privacy. I’m somewhat of an open book and can truly say I myself am on the FBI’s most unwanted list. But one thing this trip has taught me is to wake up, grow up, and pay more attention. That there are some things that I brushed aside as paranoid or conspiracy theories that are truly real because some stories along this trip I can not write.

One place that I made time for in DC was the Newseum.  Open to the Public in April of 2008, the Newseum relocated from a five year history in Arlington, Virginia which had closed in 2002, to the prominent spot on Pennsylvania Avenue with an amazing 250,000-square-foot "museum of news" that shows five centuries of news history, exhibits and hands-on technology of today.  Having spent time around the newspaper business for so long and having a deep love for the media in general and newsprint in particular,  I was equally excited to go through it as I was saddened that newspapers jumped off a cliff the day they put ads on the front page and there is a spiraling decline in the news business and the attention span of the American public. That the hunger for those deep investigative news series that powered every young journalism student’s imagination and played out in real life so many times and so many Pulitzers ago, does not exist at the same level. I believe that the news business is still the best check and balance system towards our government and who knew that de-powering the news would not take censoring or enacting laws against it? Instead the internet simply diversified the news gathering to a point of super fragmentation and human overwhelmingness (yes, I made up that word) so that we all end up a little like me right now. Somewhat clueless as to what is really going on.

As seen at the Newseum: Actual taped Watergate door.

But as I walked through the Newseum, there were so many reoccurring themes. We think our problems are new and different than any other generation. But history recorded through the news seems to repeat.

Quotes from the magazine article talked about individual rights being the trickiest legal problem facing the U.S. today. Was this a story about the recent events with Edward Snowden unveiling secrets of our government’s scope of surveillance on its citizens and the world?

No.

I was quoting LIFE magazine cover story “Electronic Snooping Insidious Invasions of Privacy” and the inside articles “Snooping Electronic Invasion of Privacy” and “The Miniature Tools of the Eavesdropper’s Trade” by John Neary dated May 20, 1966.

A purchase along my trip, one of the Presidential Libraries were selling LIFE for $5 each as a fundraiser.
 I took a small collection home including this one.