The United States of Surveillance

This post is a review of The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States. By Brian Hochman. Harvard University Press. 360 pp. $35.

Writing for a 5-4 majority in Olmstead v. The United States (1928), Chief Justice William Howard Taft upheld the right of the government to wiretap Roy Olmstead, “King of the Bootleggers.” The Fourth Amendment “does not forbid what was done here,” Taft declared. “There was no searching. There was no seizure. The evidence was secured by the sense of hearing, and that only.”

In his dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis maintained that wiretapping violated a citizen’s […]

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