The Naked Society

282 Pages·2014·1.36 MB·English

by  Vance Packard

Copyright © 1964 by Vance Packard.
Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Rick Perlstein.
All rights reserved.
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.
Please direct inquires to: Ig Publishing
392 Clinton Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238
www.igpub.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Packard, Vance, 1914-1996.
The naked society / Vance Packard ; [introduction by] Rick Perlstein.
pages cm Originally published: New York : David McKay, 1964.
ISBN 978-1-935439-86-8 (ebook) 1. Liberty. 2. Privacy, Right of--United States. 3. Freedom.
4. Privacy, Right of. I. Title.
JC599.U5P36 2013
323.4’90973--dc23
2013020662
To Harriet F. Pilpel with admiration and gratitude
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY RICK PERLSTEIN
Part I: The Mounting Surveillance
1. THE INDIVIDUAL AT BAY
2. FIVE FORCES UNDERMINING OUR PRIVACY
Part II: Some Specific Areas of Assault
3. HOW TO STRIP A JOB-SEEKER NAKED
4. THE HIDDEN EYES OF BUSINESS
5. WHERE IS ALL THE DISTRUST OF JOBHOLDERS LEADING?
6. THE VERY PUBLIC LIVES OF PUBLIC SERVANTS
7. THE WATCH OVER THE TEACHERS
8. ARE WE CONDITIONING STUDENTS TO POLICE STATE TACTICS
9. HOW SAFE IS THY CASTLE?
10. THE UNLISTED PRICE OF FINANCIAL PROTECTION
11. THE LIVELY TRAFFIC IN FACTS ABOUT US
Part III: Assaults On Traditional Rights Of Free Citizens
12. THE RIGHT TO A PRIVATE, UNFETTERED LIFE
13. THE RIGHT TO HAVE UNFASHIONABLE OPINIONS
14. THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF POLICE MISTREATMENT
15. THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF BUREACRATIC HARRASSMENT
16. THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF MIND MANIPULATION
Part IV: If Personal Liberty Is To Be Sustained
17. THE BILL OF RIGHTS UNDER SIEGE
18. WHAT WE CAN DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES
REFERENCE NOTES
APPENDIX: THE BILL OF RIGHTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
There is nothing worse than dated social criticism. So when the good folks at Ig
Publishing invited me to write this introduction, my initial reaction was
skepticism. What could a jeremiad about the epidemic of Americans spying on
one another, published in 1964—thirty years before the invention of the Internet,
thirty-seven years before 9/11, written in an age when the gravest insults to civil
liberties consisted of congressional committees asking “Are you now, or have
you ever been, a member of the Communist Party”—have to say to us now?
I picked up an ancient paperback copy of The Naked Society (“The explosive
facts behind the hidden campaign to deprive Americans of their rights to
privacy. Here’s how snoop devices are being employed by Big Government, Big
Business, and Big Educaiton in their sneak attack on YOU.”). I began reading. I
was in New York City—Penn Station, to be exact. I read Packard’s framing
questions: “Are there loose in our modern world forces that threaten to annihilate
everybody’s privacy? And if such forces are indeed loose, are they establishing
the preconditions of totalitarianism that could endanger the personal freedom of
modern man?” As I read this, I happened to notice a TV screen. Horrifying,
apocalyptic images of buildings collapsing and shadowy terrorists alternated
with messages like, “If you see anything suspicious report it to an Amtrak
employee.” And, “It’s nothing, you think. Can you be sure?” After all: “It
doesn’t hurt to be alert.”
I began reading with renewed, then steadily mounting, interest, my mind
buzzing as the parallels between then and now presented themselves. Packard
wrote, “the New York Police [have] about 200 plain-clothes men working
virtually full time at wiretapping.” That was then. This is now: the New York
Police spend $1 billion on an intelligence unit, led by an active-duty Central
Intelligence Agency Official, to infiltrate the Muslim community and spy on
mosques. The NYPD admits the program has never produced a single terrorism
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lead). Then: Packard quotes Sam Dash—who before becoming a household
name as chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee, was a leading civil
liberties expert—that a “district attorney, in office, catches an occupational
disease. He resents impediments in his way that prevent him from collecting
evidence to convict criminals.” Now: computer wizard Aaron Swartz earns an
FBI investigation for the legal act of downloading federal court files; then, after
harmlessly downloading too many scholarly articles from MIT’s computer
system, he is indicted by the office of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz for
charges that could have brought him thirty-five years in prison. Experts say he
should have earned a slap on the wrist, if that, but prosecutors hound him so
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mercilessly he commits suicide.
Then: welfare inspectors in Kern and Alameda Counties, California, stage
late-night raids on 500 houses to investigate whether there is a man living in the
household so they can cut off relief. Now: bills in states including Kansas,
Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, West Virginia, Florida, and Wyoming propose
drug tests for welfare recipients (Republicans in Congress have introduced bills
to submit recipients of both welfare and unemployment insurance to drug tests),
and state legislators in Tennessee consider a law to kick families off welfare if
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their kids get bad grades.
Then: “In cities where wiretapping was known to exist there was generally a
sense of insecurity among professional people and people engaged in political
life. Prominent persons were constantly afraid to use their telephones despite the
fact that they were not engaged in any wrongdoing.” Now: the Justice
Department secretly obtains two months of telephone records of at least twenty
Associated Press reporters and editors, including for home phones and cell
phones; as of this writing, the government will not say why it sought the records,
or how, nor whether a grand jury was involved. They only would say that U.S.
attorneys follow “all applicable laws, federal laws, federal regulations, and
Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of
media organizations,” and that “we do not comment on ongoing criminal
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investigations.” Journalists have been both victims and perpetrators of such
spying: just days before the AP story broke had come news that employees of
Bloomberg News were availing themselves of a “Snoop” function that let them
tap into the accounts of subscribers to the company’s financial information
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network.
Then: Packard writes of his horror that “cabled TV” will allow the
“possibility of getting ‘an instantaneous readout’ home by home of what
millions of people are [watching] in the entire country in about fifty seconds.”
Now: regarding the cables that connect our computers to networks of servers