I know I said I would stop, but there is one more interview from David Frost’s 1970 book, The Americans, that I want to excerpt. It’s an exchange about privacy the host had with Ramsey Clark, the noted Department of Justice lawyer. At the outset of this segment, Clark is commenting about wiretapping, though he broadens his remarks to regard privacy in general:

Ramsey Clark:

[It’s] an immense waste, an immoral sort of thing.

David Frost:

Immoral in what sense?

Ramsey Clark:

Well, immoral in the sense that government has to be fair. Government has to concede the dignity of its citizens. If the government can’t protect its citizens with fairness, we’re in real trouble, aren’t we? And it’s always ironic to me that those who urge wiretapping strongest won’t give more money for police salaries to bring real professionalism and real excellence to law enforcement, which is so essential to our safety.

They want an easy way, they want a cheap way. They want a way that demeans the integrity of the individual, of all of our citizens. We can’t overlook the capabilities of our technology. We can destroy privacy, we really can. We have techniques now–and we’re only on the threshold of discovery–that can permeate brick walls three feet thick. 

David Frost:

How? What sorts of things?

Ramsey Clark:

You can take a laser beam and you put it on a resonant surface within the room, and you can pick up any vibration in that room, any sound within that room, from half a mile away.

David Frost:

I think that’s terrifying.

Ramsey Clark:

You know, we can do it with sound and lights, in other words, visual-audio invasion of privacy is possible, and if we really worked at it with the technology that we have, in a few years we could destroy privacy as we know it.

Privacy is pretty hard to retain anyway in a mass society, a highly urbanized society, and if we don’t discipline ourselves now to traditions of privacy and to traditions of the integrity of the individual, we can have a generation of youngsters quite soon that won’t know what it meant because it wasn’t here when they came.•