The news told us not long ago that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has designs on the telephone company's electronic access to you and to me. This brings into sharp focus the thin, frayed line between national security and national spying.
A view from the past shows they have had quite enough access for a long time.
The United States stretched the spy line pretty thin during the 1960s and '70s. Many ordinary folks felt its cold touch, even the prosaic Campbells in Prince George's County.
That was in the days before the computer world opened our lives to anyone with a modem; before our medical records became an open book. Our telephones in Mount Rainier had been serenading us with music, to the detriment of conversation, so we called Chesapeake and Potomac repair. The pleasant young man checked out the the instrument in the den and the one beside our bed upstairs.
Then, he came down to the entry hall, looked over his clipboard notes and asked, "Okay, where's the other one?"
"Other what?" we wondered, baffled.
"Other 'phone," he replied. "My records say there's a .... oops!" and he seemed to forget the whole thing, said good day, and left.
Indignantly convinced that we were being bugged by Big Brother -- whoever that was -- we entertained ourselves for weeks by making slighting remarks aimed at our "listeners." That soon became boring, of course, but a nervous feeling persisted.
In retrospect, the actions of that telephone repair guy seem thin evidence of government spying. Maybe you had to be there. It was a time of heavy suspicion. Our college-age kids felt it in their classrooms, and more strongly in occasional jobs with student organizations.
My own early encounters with the security phenomenon intensified during my career with our nation's news organization, the United States Information Agency (USIA), "Telling America's Story to the World."
As an agency close to foreign policy, USIA maintained a security arm, linked with others. Most security professionals I found to be just that; pros, able and devoted to a complex task.
Now and then, however, incidents brought me up short and made me fear for my individual freedom; my own "security."
During the 1970s, our union negotiated permission for workers to see their personnel files and -- under guardianship of a security officer -- their security files. The intent was to keep the records accurate. An employee in a related field had committed suicide after being released for lack of promotion. His awards and commendations had been put in someone else's file.
Once given the right, we were advised to check these records every year. Good idea. I was stunned to find in 1973 that an operative from the National Security Agency had visited and told my agency's security officers I was applying for a job at NSA. On this pretext, the agent had received full access to my file.
I went ballistic, demanding an investigation, explaining that neither I nor any member of my family had applied for employment at NSA. I took extreme umbrage, I raged, at USIA's making free with my security file on the word of an NSA agent.
USIA did investigate, found nothing they considered out of order (!), and the whole thing remained unresolved.
The FBI wiretaps of Dr. King and Morton Halperin and others were fresh in our minds, and "security" agencies were viewed askance with good reason.
But security types have a kinship to which the rest of us may not relate. They expressed amazement at my strong feelings, and even felt called upon to write a memo to a supervisor about my outrage. (I did call the FBI and CIA "unAmerican," come to think of it.)
My outburst gained me no official satisfaction, but I got a letter of support from Halperin, urging me to "Fight back against the spies!"
On the strength of this event, I vowed increased vigilance -- a good idea for us all -- and began to read my file more carefully.
Care yielded interesting results. Reading early records, I discovered a curious notation. The investigators found a Josephine Campbell of Washington who belonged to an organization which had been instrumental in obtaining for Miss Marian Anderson the venue of the Lincoln Memorial when she was refused the concert stage of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
With great relish, I pointed out to the security division that I had been a kid of 12 named Josephine Conrad living in Daytona Beach, Florida, at the time of the famous happening.
However, I wrote in a memo to the chief of security, despite my ineligibility and unavailability for membership in the group, I -- as a grownup -- enthusiastically endorsed its goals. For that reason, I went on, the error should be preserved in my security file along with the memo in which I pointed it out.
I got some sadistic enjoyment out of that through the years, pointing it out to each security officer supervising my annual file perusal.
My satisfaction was chilled, however, by a nagging thought. The investigators noted in the early record that the organization was not, repeat not, on the House Unamerican Activities Committee list of "bad guys."
So, why was an organization formed to gain public access for an African-American artist considered grist for a security report?
I never got an answer to that one...either. Beware.
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