The Naked Society. Vance Packard
Copyright © 1964 by Vance Packard.
Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Rick Perlstein.
All rights reserved.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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
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
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
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 lead).1 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 mercilessly he commits suicide.2
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 their kids get bad grades.3
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.