Reading Alex Kingsbury’s essay in the New York Times, “We’re About to Find Out What Happens When Privacy Is All But Gone”, I found myself both agreeing with his argument overall—that “privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore” and that “we should start talking about what comes next” rather than just try to roll back the clock and yet also thinking a bit on how much privacy hasn’t existed for some people for quite a while.
As I write this , I’m looking at a file in the UK National Archives on Kwame Nkrumah, the first head of state of independent Ghana. It’s a collection of materials assembled by the security services of the early 1950s, before Ghana became independent. It’s one a series of such files on Nkrumah.
I’ve looked at these files before, in a previous research trip. There’s a lot of them, on a lot of individuals. The business of surveilling a larger and larger number of people in more and more pervasive and systematic ways grew by leaps and bounds in the 1940s and 1950s throughout Western Europe and the United States.
In the case of West Africans deemed of interest to the security services—and of anyone else in West Africa or involved with West Africa who was of interest, whether American, British, or otherwise—their mail was routinely intercepted and opened, on a systematic basis. Their physical movements were watched. In most meetings they attended that were larger than a conversation between three to four people, there was someone there who made a report to security services afterwards, often a person who was thought to be a part of the group or set of associates that the surveilled person was working with.
Every year, the London authorities and the West African Security Office were working to create more information about a larger and larger number of named individuals. Every time they saw a West African in the UK, or heard the name of a new person, they made inquiries. They wanted to know who all of them were. West Africans from the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Gambia, Cameroons who had been generic types, anonymous subjects of imperial authority, only occasionally bare sketches as of human beings with histories and personality and goals, were blossoming in the eyes of government into distinct individuals who needed to be known and knowable, with few constraints on how security services were to go about collecting that information. (The major discussion in these files is just about how to protect high-value insiders who were providing intelligence and how to avoid any embarrassing disclosures about surveillance that might look bad for the government, not about the ethics of surveillance itself.)
Anybody on a contemporary college or university campus in the United States who has taken an interest in records that have been requested under the Freedom of Information Act has discovered that there was a time in the 1950s and 1960s, persisting often into the 1970s, where a small number of staff, faculty and students were routinely surveilling the rest of the campus and filing reports on any activities deemed even vaguely left-wing or political by the observers. Campus operators often listened in on phone calls in the era when they were able to do so.
As with so many things in 21st Century life that are commonly criticized as negative changes from past norms, we have a misleading idea of how long the norms we prefer actually existed and a mistaken sense of who exactly got to partake of those norms. To some extent, the past we are mourning is a short and specific time from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, almost no matter what issue we’re talking about, whether it’s government ethics or bipartisan cooperation or middle-class security or more people studying English literature and history. Or, in this case, an era where many people had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their everyday lives and even in their social and political activities.
There are entire classes and groups of people—Black people, for example—who’ve never had that expectation, even in that moment. But there was a brief time where security services were placed under more constraints or at least feared possible legal and administrative repercussions for overly aggressive surveillance practices, and it was a time that coincided with new flows of people, goods and culture at a global scale that made tracing individuals vastly harder and a time that coincided with new technologies of communication that were more and more difficult to penetrate. The West Africa Security Office could open all of Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore’s letters, but by 1980, the thought of intercepting, opening and resealing all the mail passing between one place and another—or even to and from one individual—was too daunting. There were too many individuals to know them all.
That era closed before we even had a chance to fully recognize that it had existed. 9/11 and similar attacks in Western Europe gave a broad license given to security and police to close it. The infrastructures of digital communication offered new opportunities to analyze communications at even the most dizzying of scales. And we all began to allow companies to track our movements, activities and interests to the point that we found ourselves no longer able to disallow it without disabling our access to the economy and to public culture. As with many other short-lived changes in modern life, we were allowed to experience those changes only long enough to miss them when they were gone.