History of Surveillance in America

Brian Hochman assumes this conversation is being recorded. It's a professional hazard for the Georgetown associate professor of English and American studies. For the last several years, Hochman has been studying electronic surveillance—both the technological developments that have made eavesdropping possible and the cultural and political realities that have made it a part of American life for more than 150 years. “Americans have come to terms with the inconvenient truth that there is no such thing as electronic communication without electronic eavesdropping,” says Hochman, a 2017-2018 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, who is currently writing a book on the subject. With wiretapping in the headlines and “smart” speakers in millions of homes, we asked Hochman to take us back the early days of eavesdropping and to consider the future of “dataveillance.”