Brian Hochman is Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, which was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Laura Romero Prize for Best First Book.
Smart, entertaining, and occasionally alarming…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.
*New Republic*
[This] thoughtful, searching history reminds us that the practice
of wiretapping was steeped from the start in
lawlessness…Wiretapping, in the public’s mind, was what crooks
did…The Listeners does a wonderful job evoking a world shaped by
intense distaste for surveillance, even if the sharp emotions that
once energized the battle now seem lost to history.
*Washington Post*
Since 9/11, wiretapping in the United States has largely been
viewed as the preserve of the ‘national security state.’ In The
Listeners, Brian Hochman suggests a revisionist reading, in which
wiretapping is diffused throughout US society, from ‘private ears’
snooping on cheating spouses to corporations fishing for dirt on
rivals and police eavesdropping on poor Black communities.
*Times Literary Supplement*
The fraught relationship between privacy and security is at the
crux of The Listeners, which covers the history of eavesdropping
from the Civil War to 9/11. Throughout that long history, the
threat—real or imagined—of crime almost invariably took priority
over civil liberties. Racist dog whistles shaped surveillance laws
in 1968, and people of color historically bore the brunt (and still
do) of police surveillance.
*The Nation*
Chronicles how electronic surveillance became ‘normalized’ in the
U.S.…For Hochman, the history of wiretapping ultimately feeds into
the larger racial tragedy of mass incarceration and
overcriminalization.
*New Yorker*
Hochman makes a compelling case that concerns about threats to
privacy that had been widely shared by Americans were pushed to the
margins by claims that eavesdropping was necessary to enforce
Prohibition, defeat drug dealers, prevent race riots, and protect
national security…An engaging and informative account of
wiretapping in American popular culture.
*Psychology Today*
A fascinating look at the battle between surveillance and privacy
in the United States over the past 150 years.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
[A] fascinating history [of] how wiretapping by U.S. law
enforcement agencies went from a ‘dirty business’ to a ‘standard
investigative tactic.’…This is an essential and immersive look at
‘what happens when we sideline privacy concerns in the interest of
profit motives and police imperatives.’
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
A fun read…This is a history of uneasiness and discomfort with the
way an emerging technology can reshape the nature of private and
public life…Show[s] how the United States became a nation of proud
‘freedom lovers’ who also willingly accept Facebook and Google
making fortunes from their data. For anyone looking for a
prehistory of the ambivalent and paradoxical aspects of American
thought around digital surveillance, this is your book.
*History Today*
Listen carefully to this absorbing history of wiretapping and
you’ll hear the tones of today’s surveillance society, a century
and a half in the making. Brian Hochman’s splendid book reveals how
a once-new technology embedded itself in American life, found novel
uses, and shaped areas ranging from police tactics to privacy
rights—illuminating in the process the consequences and costs of a
networked world.
*Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy
in Modern America*
Fast-paced, compulsively readable, artfully researched, and
historically astute, The Listeners reminds us that Americans once
cared about privacy—and that we should too.
*Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American
Telecommunications*
Hochman’s comprehensive and compelling narrative illustrates how
the ‘dirty business’ of wiretapping has become a common and iconic
feature of American life.
*Cyrus Farivar, author of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of
Surveillance Tech*
Brian Hochman’s deeply researched, eminently readable, and
intensely timely book excavates the history of electronic
surveillance from the telegraph to the planetary infrastructures
and corporations that have become inextricable from everyday life.
Along the way, he shows how widespread resistance to wiretapping
may provide a guide to addressing some of the most urgent questions
about the implications of living in a fully connected world.
*Trevor Paglen*
The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States weaves
different kinds of history together in a single, compelling story
about the rise of electronic surveillance, police secrecy, and
technology. It’s a story about how electronic surveillance has
become ordinary and acceptable: how the technology and the uses for
the technology developed; then, how ordinary citizens understood
and experienced the technology over time.
*Claire Potter, author of Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to
Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our
Democracy*
The moral of The Listeners’s 150-year history is what Hochman calls
the devastating ‘banality of electronic surveillance in America.’
Espionage was and remains dependent on technologies so central to
everyday life they appear mundane—and it has always hinged on the
work of ordinary people who, for better or worse, often consider
their labor anything but extraordinary. Today, high-tech
surveillance perniciously extends state power precisely because so
many of us are bound up in its mechanizations, whether we want to
be or not.
*Boston Review*
Hochman narrates a history of surveillance in the United States…The
Listeners is also a story about technology and the challenges
around controlling or regulating it as it evolves.
*PopMatters*
[The Listeners] deserves to be read widely…Hochman’s book
constitutes a superb contribution to a topic that is in desperate
need of scholarly attention.
*Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books*
Hochman has skilfully contributed to understanding the phenomenon
of wiretapping as a dirty business during the mid-nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and the ways it evolved and flourished as a
lawless tool in America both within and outside the state.
*Technology and Culture*
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