VI

In the course of the past quarter-century, certain modes of instrusion into personal and corporate privacy that existed in an incipient or restricted scale in the last part of the nineteenth century have been accentuated. The increase which we have noted has been the accomplishment mainly of certain sectors of the elites of our society-the politicians, owners and managers of property, highly educated administrators, journalists, and research workers. (Of course, the actual physical work of intrusion is often done by less educated, less powerful policemen, intelligence functionaries, detectives, etc.) Intrusions into privacy have been so intertwined with the pursuit of objectives which are unimpugnable in our society, such as freedom of the press, the protection of public order, the prevention of subversion, the protection of private property, the increase of industrial and administrative efficiency, and the advancement of knowledge, that practically every extension of the front could be accepted as reasonable and useful. Each objective has appeared, to large sectors of the elites at the center of society, to be well served by the particular form of instrusion into personal and corporate privacy which their agents have chosen for the purpose.

The movement has not been all in one direction. Certain sections of the legal profession, the judiciary and legislative bodies have repeatedly attempted, since the end of the Second World War, to restrict and diminish the amount of intrusion into personal privacy. In the past few years, the enormities of intrusion have activated a quite new concern to protect personal privacy. The resistance thus far is largely an elite resistance. The promotion of as well as the resistance against intrusions into privacy seem thus to be largely matters of concern to the elites of our society.

We live in a society which is often called a "mass society," and in which the demands of the "masses" are said to be decisive in determining the character of the society.

To what extent have the masses been responsible for the intrusions into privacy? In the older types in which the mass of the population has practicedsuch as prying into the affairs of neighbors, disclosing the confidences of friends and acquaintances, following closely the movements of spouses, keeping informed about the affairs of kinsmen and offspring-the situation is perhaps more favorable than it used to be before the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Of the newer types, it may be said that the masses have not initiated them. Governments, journalists, employers, and social scientists have been the main intruders into personal and corporate privacy. The masses have, however, accepted these intrusions both into their own personal privacy and into that of others. They have accepted the excesses of the security programs in government and private industry with negligible objection. They have not felt themselves continuously under scrutiny-once cleared, they regarded the matter as settled, and, in most instaces, they knew little of what was going on. And they have shown little solicitude for those who were not cleared. It has been generally believed that the practices have been justified because they were allegedly designed to catch the disloyal and subversive. As for the disloyal and the subversive, they have not been regarded as possessing any rights and there could be no legitimate complaint if they were affronted or injured.

As regards the doings of private operatives, most people do not come under their scrutiny and if they do, they seldom know it. There is a belief that only wrongdoers and potential wrongdoers attract the attention of private operatives, and they, like those who are allegedly or potentially subversive or disloyal, have no rights which need be considered.

The infringements on the private sphere of employees through the removal of toilet doors and closed-circuit television for continuous scrutiny arouse some resentment among those whose privacy is thus infringed, but one has the impression that is the trade union leaders who react most strongly, not the rank and file.1

Nor do the intrusions of the popular press and certain television features arouse any moral condemnation. On the contrary, they are rather enjoyed by those who witness them and, in most cases, by those whose personal privacy is intruded upon.

1 Many persons seem to take the view that television surveillance of the behavior of employees within a factory or office comes within the prerogative of the employer, since it is the employer's private space.

The enrichment of the advanced modern societies of the Western world has made possible an increase in leisure time; it has nutured an increased hedonism, an increased desire for pleasure. Increased leisure and the increased desire for pleasure on the part of persons without either sufficient education or sufficient intelligence to extend the radius of their interest or imagination beyond their neighbors, beyond the personal onto a more transcendent level, or to find gratification in the reading of fictional accounts of personal private lives, have engendered a demand for allegedly real accounts of the personal private lives of real persons who live in the center of society, who are influential and creative. Television programs and popular magazines include among their repertoire personal portraits, interviews which ask questions about personal private matters, explorations of the private affairs of public figures in the entertainment and political worlds. "Candid cameras" are regarded as perfectly legitimate at least one has heard no charges of impropriety against them. The intimacies of other persons are "interesting," and where they are degrading to the mighty and great, they are all the more acceptable. The embarrassments of those who have discomfiting disclosures made about them are as attractive as a boxing match.

Intrusions into personal privacy are part of the currency of present-day society. Even though the government's intrusions, because they are usually held secret or confidential by their official custodians, do not give the pleasure which is given by those in the media of the press, daily and periodical, and the television, they are accepted as having the same legitimacy as laws, taxes, and trade union fees. They are regarded as not necessarily agreeable but probably right and in any case inevitable.

The belief in American society that the personal privacy of other persons should be acknowledged and protected from authority or otherwise from the center of society does not have a very strong or principled adherence among the lower middle and working classes. There is, indeeded, a welcoming of the opportunity to share in the knowledge made available by breaches in the barriers around it. There is little resistance to infringements on one's own privacy, particularly as long as the information so obtained does not circulate widely and as long as it does not invlove clandestine and coercive intrusion into private spaces. In the case of many persons and for many types of personal actions, a wide diffusion through television or press is welcomed. Most individuals do not wish any disclosure of personal private actions which might be derogatory to themselves to be widely circulated, but about more neutrally assessed intimacies they have much less reluctance. In fact, they prefer a certain amount of publicity, not because they think that their private actions will evoke admiration, but because they enjoy the act of sharing or communion with a very large circle at least for a short period. Perhaps they would not wish to have all their actions-even those which are not morally reprehensible exhibited to a boundless audience; but, as an occasional variation from a state of unregarded obscurity, it is welcome.

Nonetheless, all these complaisances notwithstanding, and despite this enfeeblement of the ethos of “respectability," there also persists among the citizenry of contemporary America, as well as in other countries, a belief that "one should keep one's own counsel," that the family next door should not know all that goes on within the walls of one's own dwelling place. There is reluctance, even repugnance, about having one's own telephone conversations listened to by other persons, known or unknown to the speaker-and that quite apart from any harm which might be done by the eavesdropper. There is still disapproval of tale-bearing gossips, and there is a modicum of respect for the privacy of those with whom one associates in face-to-face relationships.

What is the relationship between the reserve just referred to, and the readiness to accept and even to welcome disclosures about one's own personal private affairs, and the rather considerable indifference to infringement on the privacy of others?

There is more insistence on privacy before those whom one "knows," i.e., those whose names are known and whose presence is frequent, than before anonymous entrants into the private sphere, especially when they enter following even a simulacrum of assent. This is so in the case of the interviewee in a research relationship, or the applicant for private or government employment. There is at least that much acknowledgment of the rights and bona fides of authority. There is also a greater readiness to accept an intrusion into the private sphere where the intruder supplies an at least nominal guarantee that the information disclosed

about private things will not be openly or widely circulated. An assurance of "secrecy" or "confidentiality" is often regarded as a wholly acceptable condition for the admission of an intruder into one's private sphere.

But the fact remains that participation in the disclosure of the personal private affairs of others, where it is not an object of intense exertion on the part of the recipient, has an appreciative audience. Few indeed are those who will adamantly refuse to hear about the personal private affairs of others whom they know or know about. Whether it is out of desire for a wider conviviality or for the degradation and humiliation of a fellow human being, the entry, on one's own initiative or through the intrusive action of others, into other persons' personal private affairs is one of the features of human society.'

The point is that, quite apart from the ecological dependence of human beings on each other, they cannot sustain a great deal of privacy. They do not wish to be contained within the boundaries defined by those whom they know personally and with whom they are in relations of intimacy and mutual confidence. They wish to extend the scope of their existence through the exercise of their imagination. For those who lack the creative power to spur their imaginations, the personal private affairs of the fellow men whom they know and of the eminent persons at the center of society offer a more easily available sustenance for this need to extend the scope of their existence.

Nor do they want always to keep within themselves. They want to extend themselves by sharing with others what they know of themselves. Sometimes they wish to share this knowledge with particular persons, and the act of sharing also simultaneously erects a boundary which separates the community of the sharers.

They want to share in privacy. This paradoxical combination of control over what belongs to the self and its transcendence in a relationship of sharing runs throughout the whole complex of the phenomena which are subsumed under the term "privacy." That which is solitarily private is often impelled outward into a community of two persons; that which is personally private between two persons is often impelled outward into a sharing between one of the two and a third person; and so it goes-but nearly always with the intention that it should not pass beyond that third or nth sharer. Voluntary self-disclosure is not usually intended to be boundless. The disclosure does not entirely annihilate the boundedness characteristic of privacy.

The desire for privacy is nearly always partial. There is a desire to be simultaneously in private and in "public" relations with particular other persons. Thus not everything is shared with those with whom certain things are shared. Certain private matters might be shared with some persons, other private things might be shared with other persons.

VII

The present concern for privacy does not rest on the belief that every individual or that every primary group must be a windowless monad. Communion is a good as much as indivdual autonomy. Self-transcendence is an essential to man's existence as the dignity of selfhood or individuality. The present concern for privacy does not absolutize privacy.

It is also to be recognized that the personal privacy of individuals and groups among their peers and intrusions into personal privacy among peers are not a great issue. Personal privacy among peers is as strongly entrenched as most individuals who possess it wish to make it. And in so far as it is not, most

1 This willingness and even desire to know about the personal private affairs of others might be functions of certain fundamental qualities of human beings in contemporary society. We refer here to the increased individuality and the increased empathic capacity and needs of the expansive ego characteristic of an individualistic and open society. First of all, it should be said that the growth of individuality has contributed to the demand for privacy. The awareness of self, of the uniqueness of the self, makes for a greater sensitivity to impingement on self, to intrusion into the zone around that self. Individuality makes for spontaneity and the prizing of relationships spontaneously entered into and maintained by a mutuality of spontaneously flowing sentiment. Such relationships generate a demand for privacy, since they feel the alien character of intruders who cannot produce the affirmative spontaneity necessary to a proper participation. But the growth of individuality has a dialectical relationship to privacy. Individuality has provided a necessary condition for empathy.

Empathy entails a sense of affinity with the mind and state of feelings of other individuals. But the empathic capacity also brings with it the desire to enter the mind and the desire to know what is there.

of the intrusions, which do not involve the new technology of intrusion, are beyond the bounds of control. At least they connot be controlled by anyone except the persons or groups whose personal privacy is intruded upon.

Privacy has become a problem in the past few decades not because the human race has gone mad and wishes to renounce a valuable feature of existence. On the contrary, there is still a great deal of attachment, both in daily practice and in principle, to privacy, and that is perhaps not less, perhaps even more than in previous times.

Privacy has become a problem because it has become engulfed in the expansion of the powers and aspirations of elites and in the difficulties which then encounter in attempting to govern and protect and please vast collectivities.1

It is not that some of these intrusions into personal privacy are not sometimes necessary and therefore justified. The tasks which the electorate wishes modern governments to perform do require much information. Industrial enterprises should seek to be efficient and intrusion into employee's privacy is alleged by the intruders to contribute to efficiency. The mass media should entertain as well as enlighten and the public is entertained by private disclosures. Public order must be established and maintained and subversion prevented and these require many types of surreptitious intrusion. The systematic empirical study of human society should be cultivated and this requires intrusion into the personal and corporate private spheres.

The common good cannot be realized in a society consisting only of private entities; it requires some restrictions on the rights of personal and corporate privacy. Nonetheless one is also impressed by the spuriousness and frivolity of many of the justifications given for the extensiveness of the instrusion into privacy which various elite groups practice, instigate or tolerate. A great deal of the intrusion into personal privacy is not only an immoral affront to human dignity, it is also quite useless and unnecessary from any serious standpoint. Much of it is unnecessary to effective government, efficient administration, national security, the progress of knowledge, or industrial productivity. Much of it is the frivolous self-indulgence of the professionals of intrusion.

When we contend for privacy in contemporary society, it is not that we are anxious lest all privacy be obliterated. That is not the problem. Obviously, each individual will always be private to most other people in his society; and even when his personal private affairs are penetrated, the knowledge so gathered will not be universally diffused. Such extreme possibilities are of no relevance to our discussion because they are so improbable.

What is more worthy of consideration is the expansion of the private-infringing actions of government. We need not go as far as conceiving of continuous surveillance of everyone and the collation into computer dossiers of every bit of information about them at every stage of life. Nor need we worry unduly about the use which a tyrannial government could make of such information in pursuing those whose devotion to it is less than perfect.

We can however imagine a few of the less dramatic consequences of the realization of the present desires of various officials and research workers. There might well be some benefit, even considerable benefit for sociological research to have this vast mass of material amalgamated into a form in which it is susceptible of analysis through a computer. It is less easy to imagine the institutionally admissible benefits for routine administration of all this amalgamation of information. I do not know how it could be used in a way which is compatible with the rule of law which more or less informs our present day practice.

Still let us imagine that all the information the Federal government possesses about its citizens is amalgamated into the National Data Center. Arguments would be put forward that the federally held information should be supplemented by that held by state and local governments. The cognition appetite is an anemic one-it is incapable of satiation. It will likely occur to some ambitious social scientist and to his opposite number in the civil service to think that the information gathered in sample surveys of opinions, of market research information, etc., be added as well. Naturally there would be qualms among the academic

1 I mention elites, private and public, even though I am aware of the obnoxiousness of the numerous private detective agencies. The depredations committed by these against personal privacy are done either at the behest of industrial and commercial employers or because of the unsatisfactory state of the divorce laws. If these two sources of support of the private detective agencies were reduced, the work of these agencies would still remain a nuisance, but only a minor one.

social scientists about the propriety of infringing the assurances of anonymity which were given to the interviewees. These qualms could however be stilled by reassurance of the confidentiality of all information given to the government. And since the gain for sociological research would appear to be so great and since the furtherance of the interests of this kind of research seems to be one of the ends of these officials who support the National Data Center, that hurdle could be got over. So it might go, on and on, medical histories, school records, psychiatric interviews, records of litigations, etc., could be added.

Those who have no positive argument for this unitary and massive breach of privacy on a national scale argue against those who can see little practical value in this, that at least it can do no harm? After all, they claim, it would be confidential. The information would not be available to the public.

This seems to me to be the flimsiest of defenses. Could such information be withheld from the public? Could a populistic society like ours tolerate such a rich and explosive mass of secrets and exclude from any share in it those who claim to have the good of the people in their charge-namely, the legislators and the journalists. An issue would be created which could find no satisfactory solution. If the executive branch were to control and monopolize such data, they would lay themselves open to charges of planning to create a Gestapo. If they relaxed their monopoly, they would be renouncing the confidentiality on which they based their argument.

It seems to me that once an institution like a National Data Center became established it would be a perpetual source of trouble. For one thing its administration would acquire a professional vested interest in the satisfaction of their cognitive appetite. As long as computers could cope or could be designed to cope with such quantities of material, there would be what would sound like good and reasonable arguments for making the informational archives of the government complete. On the outside, it would be a perpetual excitement and temptation to the professional breachers of privacy and the exploiters of such breachers. Journalists would demand access on behalf of the public interest, so would legislators. And private operatives might be able to bribe their way to information on particular persons.

I know that it might be said that the priestly, legal, and medical professions guard the confidentiality of the personal and corporate privacies which are entrusted to them. These, however, are professions with ancient traditions and long periods of initiation into the professional culture. Even then breaches by the medical profession are unknown, especially under the pressure of the organs of mass communication. (Is it at all likely that a corps of janissaries or priests will be bred to protect the National Data Center from intruders?)

In the present century, the intrusions on the private sphere have done a certain amount of harm. Individuals have been made unhappy and occupational opportunities have been denied them. Sometimes they have been humiliated unjustly and unnecessarily, and sometimes they have been damaged financially and their professional careers obstructed for considerable periods. Yet by and large, they have not had a lastingly profound effect on the structure of contemporary society. The intrustions into privacy-on behalf of national security-which disfigured the decade after the Second World War caused much useless inconvenience and embarrassment. But the main enduring consequence was the deeper entrenchment of security procedures in government and industry.

The damages done by the intrusive devices of employers can almost always be annulled by the cessation of the intrusion, and this could be done quite easily as long as conditions of full employment exist and trade union officials are alert and forceful.

The wiretappers are difficult to control, but they would have less to do if divorce laws were reformed and if the police could be increased in strength and improved in efficiency and did not have to waste their time on routine traffic control and the ceaseless and unproductive harassment of prostitutes and narcotics addicts. The problems of the control and use of wiretapping, microphone installation, etc., in the cases of known and genuine criminals by the police would still remain but the scale would be much smaller than it is at present.

It seems to me that it is the federal government which presents the greatest menace to privacy. For one thing, the federal government is training and turning out a continuous stream of specialists in intrusion into privacy who will, out of quite understandable interests, try to find customers for the privately provided services of their profession. As long as the federal security services have to be kept up to such a high level, there will be a professional vested interest among