BIG BROTHER IS LISTENING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000600040034-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 15, 1998
• Sequence Number: 34
• Publication Date: June 6, 1964
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP7
SATUIRD,kY EVENING
POST,
JUN 6 1964
FOIAb3b
BIG
BROTHER
IS LISTENING
The Government's nasty, nervous habit of spying on itself with telephone taps
and hidden microphones has encouraged a nationwide invasion of privacy.
CPYRGHT
By BEN H. BAGDIKIAN
The parties in this particular charade. or it may be a macien rtkroplioife Lrk. urd
Building were closed, two Kara vLci,na, a ~~~?????,
artment in 1953 had risen mental eavesdropping is directed against
D
ep
' the State
working men let themselves into Room
r the tnn security evaluation lobs espionage and crime, of course, but a
one o
hi
ngton. "
phone. They were Clarence J. Schneider, i in vvab
_ I ,, der suspicion. His superiors believed convenience and' gamesmanship, either
din
h
g _ ,
e was t.
State Department electronics expert. that
t. ...:I- co.,~t.mm~,ittee. in order to avoid one.
Working under orders of John F. Reilly, to a tt.,sut? --- -
So Reilly had These days, consequently, if you to e-
Reilly
boss
hi
.
,
s
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for embarrass
hone fixed to catch him in the phone a Washington official of more than
k
'
s p
a
Otep
Security, the men changed some wires, H
_i- had Otenka's wastebaskets middling importance-or if he calls you-
e
in the office of Otto F. Otepka, Deputy auu - ?-?- -
Director of the Office of Security, doubled; Reilly says he lost interest in the phone almost as high that every important word ,.at,._ 4 .-I .., - the wastehaket a you utter is being taken down in short-
as a microphone, relaying everything tar ItIL I ,ttt..,..b "?-
which was said in the office, whether or piece of carbon paper with the impression hand. And while lower, the odds are
_e , e ....,...t:,,.,.. ,,,h;el, ntenka had al- still sienificant that your entire conversa-
eavesdroppers recorded 12 separate, t., don 1w ?ny. -
time these two men-Otepka ing on one another that it has almost
A. th
e
for g
_
On July 9, four months later, Hill was, and Rvuty-ee -V--.-
nut under oath by the Senate Internal I judgment on the loyalty, securi.tyTand n at recently told. flhav ngrd scove diplo-
. d a
you know of any single instance in which and Reilly later "amp;inca- ineir acmais ;Foreign office chamber at home; he im-
the [State] Department has ever listened of eavesdropping by giving the facts
?,_ _ ~.. mediately called his security men for
.,,.
d from
an
Hill answered, "1 cannot recall such an Department. Otepka, charged with pass- "for our Russian friends." A short time
instance." ing privileged documents without author- later, an American who works for the
On August 6, Reilly was put under ity, carries on in a sort of limbo, narking American military in Washington made
in or ordered the bugging or tapping or hearing on his dismissal. and found a stranger in the process of
private conversations in the office of an brave new world of white-collar eaves- tools draped around his waist and said
employee of the State Department?" dropping in the United States Govern-
he was a telephone man checking phones.
In sight of Capitol, private investigator - merely of a silent secretary's taking clown a microphone was being planted. Asked,
ur words while you speak to her boss, non6 e e said,
Allen Cre"t go*W&M'For Release : CIA-RDP75-0491R6Vdb ~t1nu d
 CPYRGHT. 2
'nil, suppo s o -
,.one of our Russian friends"? The
American thought about that for a mo-
been," he admitted, "but I'm told our'
An expert holds a small microphone that can be hidden behind a telephone mouthpiece.
spooks do it so often, I just naturally
assumed it was one of ours."
Electronic snooping is not confined to
Government, of course. Thanks to mod-
ern science, privacy is becoming more
and more rare all over the world. Even
a child can send away for a $15 device
that picks up sounds in a room across
the street. For $17.95 you can buy a
machine that secretly tapes telephone
conversations without touching a wire.
And $150 buys a TV camera the size of
a book that can spy on a room secretly
while you watch on a distant monitor.
Using these and other modern methods,
American business has turned increas-
ingly to espionage in recent years.
But government has a special responsi-
bility to keep its snooping under tight
control. As Justice Louis Brandeis said
in 1928, "Our Government is the potent,
omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it
teaches the whole people by its example."
.Moreover, Government has the power
to, use-or misuse-secret information
against the citizens it is supposed to be
serving. Big Brother compiles dossiers
and wears a police badge.
In addition, some eavesdropping is not
only unethical but also illegal. Section
605 of the federal Communications Act
says, "No person not being authorized
by the sender shall intercept any com-
munication and divulge or publish the
existence" of a wire or radio message.
But in vast areas everyone pretends that
the law does not exist. The chief reason
is that the Government itself breaks the
law so often that it is loath to make an
issue of free-enterprise lawbreaking. Un-
authorized wire tapping and phone re-
cordings by federal, state and local law-
enforcement officials, sometimes for such
unofficial purposes as extortion and
blackmail, have been proved many times,
but in the last 20 years not one govern-
ment person has been prosecuted under
Section 605.
Not all government eavesdropping has
a sinister purpose, to be sure. The listen-
ing secretary can jot down dates and
details, can lay a file before the boss as
he talks about it, can later follow through
on the discussed arrangements without
being told. The mechanical recording can
be filed for legitimate future reference.
Moreover, in espionage and crime, the
telephone is often an instrument of con-
spiracy; under appropriate safeguards,
listening in is a proper counter-weapon.
And sometimes the government em-
ployee may simply be protecting himself.
Officials are in constant danger of being
accused of succumbing to improper in-
fluence, and it is understandable that
they would want a record of any given
conversation.
But abuses are both easy and common,
and little thought has gone into their
control. As a result, eavesdropping on
phone calls (the polite word is "monitor-
ing") has become so widespread that the
scope of the problem can only be guessed
at. There are more than 200,000 individ-
ual government telephones in the Wash-
ington area, most of them extensions on
which a third party can listen. There are
about 14,000 federal secretaries and
6,700 stenographers available to listen
and take notes. They can do this simply
by lifting an extension, but many have
special attachments that permit listening
in without clicks, background noises or
noticeable loss of volume. Known tech
nically. as- "transmitter cutoffs," they are
referred to in the trade as "snooper
buttons." In 1962 there were 5,317
snooper buttons on official Washington
phones, most of them in important offices.
In 1961, for example, Abraham Ribi-
coff, then Secretary of Health, Education
and Welfare, received a letter from Rep.
John E. Moss, the California Democrat
whose mission is investigating secrecy in
government. Moss asked Ribicoff whether
he permitted the 5,000 HEW telephones
in Washington to be used for "monitor-
ing," and Ribicoff asked his executive
assistant, Jon O. Newman, to check.
Newman noticed that along executive
corridors dozens of secretaries were con-
stantly at their desks, motionless, tele-
phone to ear, not talking. He discovered
that they were "monitoring" with the
help of snooper buttons. In fact, he dis-
covered that his own secretary used one.
There turned out to be 274 buttons in
HEW at an annual rental of about $1,500.
Ribicoff ordered all snooper buttons re-
moved, and further directed that "moni-
toring" was permissible only with prior
notice to the other side. His rules are still
the exception in government.
Big Brother's snooping is not, of
course, restricted to telephone "monitor-
ing." There is also the hidden micro-
phone, a device used widely in offices
where men and women are interviewed.
In times past, a microphone was of the
carbon type-large, inefficient, with tell-
tale wires that led to a live listener,
usually in some cramped place nearby..
Today's microphones are small as but-
tons, and some are self-contained minia-
ture broadcasting stations capable of
transmitting to a radio receiver blocks
away. They can be dropped in an office
wastebasket, made part of a man's tie
clasp or even put inside a woman's
girdle. Some segments of official Wash-
ington are so microphone-conscious that
their meetings strike visitors as rituals of
lunacy. A newcomer to the Pentagon's
high-powered military rivalries, for ex-
ample, described with wonderment a
conference of one branch's top brass
making plans to fight the appropriation
of a sister military service.
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JUN 61964
 3
"When we g ,1 the ~rux o the tans " miniature German wire recor ers anG into a recorder. Many government o -
he said, "We : 411 -ci pp vedrED]rRele t3) CAAoR?P7540149R( 06dd?04004 $nse
the room, away from walls and tele- had used tax money to buy them. It is James Forrestal, used this as a routine
phones, and spoke in low voices while typical that he found his own committee office aid, a simple administrative con-
one officer kept rattling the table. They staff had three of them. It was untypical venience.
said it would interfere with any bugs." that he admitted it. Today the practice has grown to the
(In the vocabulary of eavesdropping, a Most government eavesdroppers take extent that there is a widespread assump-
"bug " is a hidden microphone; a "tap". the same attitude toward snooping that tion in government that "someone" is
is a secret interception of a phone' call.) Victorians took toward sex: deny its always listening. Whenever their tele-
There is, it turns out, a body of folk-. existence if you can, and if you can't, phone line makes a click, some call,
lore on how to frustrate Big Brother. refuse to talk about it. In 1961, when "Yoo-hoo, Edgar!" in a left-handed salute
Some people rap the telephone with a + Congressman Moss asked government to J, Edgar Hoover. And a number of
pencil as they talk. Others run water, agencies if they ever used listening-in or people echo the complaint of Sidney
pound a table, or keep a radio or TV .set recording devices on telephones, Byron Zagri, a Teamsters Union legislative
turned on. Whether these tactics work White, then the Deputy Attorney General, counsel who told a senatorial committee
depends on how good the eavesdropper replied, "The Federal Bureau of Investi- that when he is in Washington he has to
is and how hard he is willing to work to gation advises that it does not utilize the keep shifting to public pay stations to
extract the message. Rapping the phone devices referred to in your letter." That prevent all his business with Congress-
doesn't help much. Running water is same year Assistant Attorney General men from being overheard. (Mr. Zagri
moderately good, but a determined Herbert A Miller Jr. told a Senate com- will be pained to learn that law-enforce-
snooper can filter out most of the sound. mittee that on a random day the FBI had ment agents tap more public phones than
electronically. Banging a table may jar 85 wiretaps in operation. private phones.) In governmental tele-
a bug. But the most sophisticated war-
riors keep a radio or television set turned
on loud while they speak softly and con-
tinually face in different directions (which used in the department to monitor tele- dialogues are often couched in such terms
is the reason well-bugged hotel rooms phone conversa(ions." It further pointed as: "I heard from our nervous friend, and
and offices have at least four hidden out that a departmental directive requires we're going to meet at the usual place
microphones). all recording of conversations to be done; where I'll pick up the paper he wants our
The most strategic sessions in govern- only with advance notice to the other man to deliver."
meat are held in rooms that have been party. This directive was in force during Once people believe that Big Brother
"swept that is, scanned by metal and the Otepka episode. is on the line it makes little difference
radio detectors. And the really crucial Such conflicting answers are common. whether he really is or not-a point illus-
conferences are held in a "portable room" Government officials prefer not to discuss trated by an episode in Congress a few
erected inside a "swept" room, These the subject at all, but most are inclined years ago. In early 1961 the Kennedy
consist of four lead-like portable walls
plus ceiling and floor, all latched together
to make a chamber within a chamber.
Furniture for the conference is usually
made of glass to make concealment of years. During prohibition, for example, to ensure passage. Obviously, some Con-
microphones difficult. There are no-win- eavesdropping became an important law- gressmen were promising yes and voting
down, because the human voice causes enforcement (and lawbreaking) tool. no when the measures were brought to .
windowpanes to vibrate, and a laser Under Hitler it became an instrument of the floor. This happened most often on
beam can "read" these vibrations from terror, associated in most people's minds "teller" votes, in which Congressmen
"
the outside. There are offices in the State
Department where the shades are always
drawn.to protect against laser beams and
telescopic lenses.
These precautions are taken mainly to
guard national secrets from foreign
spies-and there is abundant evidence
that enemy agents eavesdrop in every
way they can. But by far the greater
number of attempts to snoop involve
one bureaucrat spying on another bureau-
crat. The practice is so common that any
time an agency begins looking for illegal
eavesdropping it is in danger of bumping
into itself. Last year, for example, a
Congressman took over an office just
vacated by a subcommittee chairman and
found one telephone with no apparent
purpose. By experimenting, he found
that its snooper buttons let him listen
secretly to any conversation by the staff
of a committee in a nearby building.
He had the lines removed. The late Sen.
Thomas Hennings Jr. once waxed indig-
nant about the Government's use of new
had 802 snooper buttons, but added, conversations, too, confidential details
"There are no other electronic devices are never given on the telephone. And the
to regard it as a ncccssaty evil. Administration suffered several setbacks
This comes close to reflecting the atti- i
resentatives on votes
House of Re
th
p
n
e
tulle of the public as well, an attitude for which White House aides had col-
which has changed significantly over the lected commitments for enough "Yesses"
col-
with secret police. line up in "yes" columns and "no
In the United States, it started out umns and march toward the rear.of the
simply as an instrument of efficiency. House, where a teller counts the number
In 1938 the Army asked its switchboard of men in each line without recording
operators in Washington to make record- their names. Since White House aides are
ings of all long-distance calls, after first supposed to leave the chamber during the
warning both speakers. The idea was to process, anonymity is preserved.
preserve technical data. By 1940 the On March 24,1961, the Administration
volume of calls was so heavy the record- lost by 186 to 185, a vote that it had ex-
ing held up switchboard operations, and pected to win. The next day a rumor was
the recording was shifted to users of .I heard in the House cloakroom that a,
individual phones: At the same time, the miniature camera had been installed in
warning was dropped. This kind of re- the great clock at the rear of the chain-
cording was done on special machines ber-a camera capable of taking motion
connected to the telephone with jacks, 1 pictures of the men as they lined up on
and by 1946 the Army and Navy had teller votes. Four days later another
5,700 of them. But by this time hundreds crucial bill came up, and this time the
of people had discovered "instant wire Administration got exactly the votes it
tap"-a simple induction coil under the expected. And as they trooped up the
telephone that turned a dictating machine Continued
CPYRGHT
 Sanitized - Approved For Release : (IIA-RDP75-00149R000600040034-8
CPYRGHT
aisle, several Congressmen were seen to
smile heroically toward the clock. There
was, of course, no camera; the point is
that a significant number of lawmakers
believed that such a tactic might actually
be employed.
But while the Federal Government has
not gone this far, it has gone far enough.
And unless Uncle Sam seriously intends
to become the kind of all-seeing, all-
hearing Big Brother that George Orwell
wrote about, strong preventive measures
must be taken-and soon. Nothing the
Government can do will end all the evils
of snooping, but a useful first step would
be to clear up the present tangle of law
and precedent on eavesdropping. Today
the highest legal authorities differ on
what the federal law means. Some say
that tapping a phone by itself is a crime;
others-say-it is criminal only when inter-
cepted messages are disclosed. But even
in cases where everyone agrees it is a
federal crime, it is still legal in those states
with laws which are contrary to the fed-
eral statute. Six states permit wiretap-
ping, 33 specifically prohibit it, and 11
don't have any law either way.
Since 1962 there has been pending be-
fore Congress it bill approved by the
Department of Justice that would end
some of the confusion. It would permit
federal authorities under the Attorney
General to wiretap with court orders in
certain situations-espionage, subver-
sion, murder, kidnaping; interstate rack-
eteering, narcotics-and in espionage
cases the court order could be skipped
if the Attorney General felt that asking
the court would endanger the national
interest. The states would be permitted
to tap only under their highest law-
enforcement.official, with a court order,
and only when a serious crime was in-
volved-murder or kidnaping, for ex-
ample. All other wiretapping, public or
private, would be specifically prohibited,
a crime punishable by $10,000 fine or
two years in prison or both.
The bill has been stalled for two years.
Some legal authorities think it still per-
mits too much latitude for tapping. Some
law-enforcement agencies argue that it
is too restricting. The controversy, ac-
cording to most governmental experts,
can be settled when Congress gets down
to it, but in this year of even greater
controversy it is not likely.
In the meantime, snooping within gov-
ernment itself could be considerably re-
duced by an executive order from the
President, setting down uniform prac-
tices and principles to end the present
pattern of every bureaucrat's being a
law unto himself. Either way, unless firm
measures are taken soon to end the Gov-.
ernment's degrading habit of spying on
itself, the mental attitude which the prac-
tice reflects may become so firmly estab-
lished that no one will be left who realizes
the danger of having a Big Brother in
Washington. THE END
Sanitized - Approved For Release.: CIA-RDP75-00149R000600040034-8
JUN 61964