Word: westin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mechanical Spies. Sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and financed by $75,000 worth of Carnegie Corporation grants, Privacy and Freedom took four years to write. It involved Westin in hundreds of interviews, thousands of hours of research through newspapers, court records and books, ranging from Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Just as thoroughly, Westin has compiled a catalogue of electronic bugging devices, wiretaps and mechanical spies that will surprise even those who think they are up on the subject. Items currently available...
...Westin, a 37-year-old Columbia University lawyer and political scientist, is regarded by many as the leading U.S. specialist on privacy. His writings on the subject have been cited by the Supreme Court and used as a basis for legislation. In his new book published by Atheneum, Westin insists that the right to privacy must nolonger be taken for granted. The mounting psychological and electronic assault on private lives poses a threat that cannot be exaggerated, he points out, and "we have only a few years of lead time before the problem will outgrow our capacity to apply controls...
...towns have experimented with closed-circuit TV cameras on the streets; using street lights, police can watch at night for crimes. District attorneys have been known to record lawyer-defendant conferences, and everyone believes that everyone's wiretapping everyone else in Washington, D.C. One Capitol telephone line, reports Westin, had eight taps on it and was so sapped of power that normal conversations were inaudible...
Anti-Bugging. Westin also warns about the polygraph (lie detector) and personality tests that are sometimes required for employment. Worse still, he feels, could be the impact of computers. Already Americans leave a detailed trail of vital data about themselves-insurance questionnaires, loan applications, census forms, employment applications, tax returns, military and school records. If all of these are gathered into one Orwellian information bank, as some officials have proposed, a man's life may well be available at the punch of a button. When all financial transactions begin to be carried out by a universal credit-card...
There are ways to fight back, of course, and Westin discusses several, including the development of anti-bugging devices (which is lagging) and executive action (which has been led by President Johnson's restrictions on wire tapping in all federal agencies). The most progress probably has been made in the courts. Though Westin accurately predicts a landmark Supreme Court decision, the book was already on the presses when the court struck down the New York eavesdropping law and barred electronic bugging in all but the most narrowly described circumstances (TIME,June...