Word: eavesdrop
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Long is not the only one shocked by the growing arsenal of electronic devices designed to eavesdrop on their most personal affairs. The advent of the transistor marked the end of the Fourth Amendment's protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Electronic bugging has become so widespread that Congressman Emanuel Celler (D.-N.Y.) says nobody in Washington can be certain his telephones are private...
...whither he would tend. Newsmen got no hint of the President's plans during his long, sequestered sojourn at the L.B.J. ranch. At the White House, security precautions were so rigid that reporters were barricaded out of hearing range of the typing pool so that they could not eavesdrop on secretaries proofreading the speech aloud. Johnson held his options open until the eleventh hour, ordering innumerable page-by-page rewrites-mostly by outgoing Press Secretary Bill Moyers, chief writer of the speech. Not until 5½ hours before he was to speak did he iron out the final dimensions...
...after. To him, there are no holds barred when he is digging. He once hounded a locked-door session of a board of supervisors in his home state of Iowa by climbing onto the second-story ledge of the courthouse and later wriggling through a cornfield to eavesdrop on his prey in a farmhouse; they felt so harassed that they finally abandoned closed meetings...
...government, the trend is toward more privacy. Recently the FCC banned the use of radio devices by private citizens to eavesdrop on others. The civil service abolished personality tests. The Internal Revenue Service, which had been caught bugging rooms where taxpayers conferred with lawyers, promised never to do it again. The Post Office walled up the peepholes through which its agents had been spying on postal employees in their locker rooms and toilets...
...toddler, he would eavesdrop on his sisters' piano lessons, and by the time he was three he was "a terrible little fiend" about music, screaming when his sisters struck a sour note, banging the piano lid down on their fingers. At four, he was performing at charity concerts, pressing his engraved calling cards on everyone he met: ARTUR THE GREAT PIANO VIRTUOSO. It annoyed him even then that people always asked if he was any kin to the great Anton Rubinstein, and so he took to prancing around town with the words NO RELATION inscribed on the front...