Uncle Sam wants your privacy. Source: Jeff Schuler via Flickr (https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jeffschuler/2585181312/in/set-72157604249628154)

Keeping Tabs

Data & Surveillance in America

09.29.16

Calls to pardon Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who blew the whistle on the NSA’s secret internet and phone surveillance programs, have increased with the recent release of the “Snowden” movie. As the country once again debates whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero, BackStory takes a look at the changing ways we’ve collected information on each other – and when it crosses from a matter of national security into something more sinister.

data; surveillance

Segments

Bad Credit, No Credit?

Historian Scott Sandage tells Ed about the rise of credit-rating agencies in the mid-19^th Century, and the indignation many Americans felt at this new assessment of their “credit-worthiness.”

credit; credit reporting; data; surveillance

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, and I’m here with Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey, Ed. And Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Ed.

ED: In 1855, a New York City office received a tip from rural Virginia. It concerned a local fellow named Robert Brown.

SCOTT SANDAGE: October 16, 1855. Brown is one of nature’s best sons that takes things as they are and does not push about anything. We do not mean that he is a lazy or slovenly man– no. He is a nice, good gentlemen– a little liable to be imposed on by sorry men that profess to be gentleman.

ED: This trip was duly noted in tiny handwriting on one of the pages of an enormous folio volume. Six months later, there was another tip.

SCOTT SANDAGE: They report that he has a large land and Negro holder– meaning he owns a lot of land and he owns a lot of slaves. He’s an extravagant liver, much in debt– considered very good for debts, indeed. He is considered rich, high-minded, and honorable, but spends more than he makes.

ED: Every six months, another update would arrive concerning the personal and business dealings of Robert Brown. A little over two years after that first report, the central office received this notice.

SCOTT SANDAGE: To my surprise, he has failed. I knew he was in debt, but I had no idea he owed one fourth as much as he does.

ED: Now, this reports dry up during the Civil War, but a few years later, they pick up again.

By the 1980s, it seems business had turned very much south for Robert Brown.

SCOTT SANDAGE: In business some two years, no capital known of, has always been unsuccessful. Character very good, capacity moderate. Caution advised. And then the final report in 1880– no means. Advise caution.

ED: Our reader here is Scott Sandage, an historian who has spent many hours combing through records like these. You see, Robert Brown was hardly the only American whose profile was being carefully compiled in six-month installments.

Many miles away, tens of thousands of Americans were also being closely watched by people in their communities. People in the employ of an outfit called Tappan’s Mercantile Agency. It was the nation’s first credit rating company.

SCOTT SANDAGE: And this is the origin of what we all live in terror of– this is going into your permanent record, young man. And Robert Brown’s permanent record shows that although he has a great approach to life and is a gentleman in 19th century terms, he’s just not a good businessman.

BRIAN: In June of this year, Americans learned about two previously secret National Security Agency programs– programs that collect and store massive amounts of data about our cellphone and internet communications.

Ever since, there’s been a lot of debate about whether these sorts of surveillance programs are necessary for our well-being or whether they cross a line.

PETER: And so today on the show, we’re going to push this question back through time. How did earlier generations keep tabs on one another, and how much resistance was there? We’ve got stories about a census showdown, vigilante spies, and a data miner in Virgina who made it his mission to separate black from white.

ED: We’ll begin with the story of Lewis Tappan. Now, Tappan was a New York merchant and a prominent abolitionist who lost his business the panic of 1837. He discovered that the people who owed him weren’t good for the money because the people who owed them couldn’t collect their debts, and so on.

And so Tappan got to thinking. If he could somehow figure out who was likely to be a deadbeat, he could sell that information to other businessmen and they would all be less likely to fail in a future panic.

Scott Sandage explained how this idea would become the business model for that mercantile agency we were hearing about a few minutes ago. Tappan started out by relying on eyewitness testimonies from a few abolitionist friends in a handful of cities.

SCOTT SANDAGE: By 1850, nine years into his business, he has 2,000 correspondence in just about every town in America. And their job was to send in reports on particular inquiries about particular people.

ED: Now, this is very genteel language– his correspondence with inquiries.

SCOTT SANDAGE: Yeah. Eventually they’re called agents, but initially he refers to them as correspondents in a journalistic sense. These are correspondents reporting from the field.

ED: And they really are doing investigations of their neighbors, right?

SCOTT SANDAGE: To whatever degree they are inclined to do so. There are, at the beginning, no guidelines for them what is relevant and what is not relevant. You get a real mixture of local gossip, inside information, personal habits.

ED: Let’s say you were a subscriber to this. How would you actually find out what you paid for?

SCOTT SANDAGE: You had to go to the offices of the Mercantile Agency, which were behind Wall Street in New York City. And you went in and what you saw was a long row of very high 19th century Ebenezer Scrooge type desks.

And behind each of those desks was a clerk. And when you came to the head of the line, you would fill out what was called an agency ticket of inquiry. And the clerk would hand it to a page boy, who would then skedaddle into the stacks, which you could see row upon row, shelf upon shelf, of these immense red leather books, that the page boy would then bring and plop it down on the Ebenezer Scrooge desk, and it would thump like a family Bible.

And it would be opened to the precise page where the information on the person you were seeking could be found. They did not provide written copies of the report. They were, from the very beginning, leery of libel.

So they would read you the information, and you were permitted to take notes, if you wished.

ED: So this sounds even scarier than reading your credit report on freecreditreport.com, then. You’re being read with sort of Charles Dickens like glee as your character is failing.

SCOTT SANDAGE: And the thing is, it could be read to others, but not to you. You had no right to know what information there was about you. You had no way of knowing whether it was correct or incorrect. And if it proved to be incorrect, you had no way of forcing the company to change what it had written about you.

ED: So what might one of these reports sound like, Scott?

SCOTT SANDAGE: This is a report from J. M. Phelps in Oak Grove, Virginia, who, in 1855, is a large land and Negro holder, again. And the reporter says, I suppose he is good for what he owes and perhaps a good deal more, but any man that gambles and drinks– you know how far he ought to be trusted.

A few years later, the reporter is clearly annoyed that he has not yet failed since morally he is bound to fail. July, 1857. Generally drunk and gambles, it is said. Credits sinks, but he is yet good for his debts. Better make him pay lest he fail without doing so.

ED: So business had been going on for centuries without this system. What happened in America in the 1830s that made this come about?

SCOTT SANDAGE: Well, we’re in the time of American history when people began to know what a stranger was. People began to encounter strangers on railroad cars, in cities, on steamboats.

And strangers were people that didn’t really enter your mind in earlier times of American history. The transportation revolution, the communications revolution, and the various financial and business revolutions that were happening made it more and more likely that you would not only meet or encounter strangers, but that you would have to get involved with strangers, particularly if you were a businessman.

If you were a wholesaler in New York City, you’ve got to sell to retailers in Wisconsin, and you do not have any of the traditional ways of sizing that person up as trustworthy or not trustworthy. So–

ED: And they certainly can’t ask a friend what do you think?

SCOTT SANDAGE: Right, because they don’t know any friends.

ED: Exactly.

SCOTT SANDAGE: So business has moved beyond the realm of kith and kin and community. We were now seeing confidence men and forgers and swindlers of all types, and so there really needed to be a middle man who would collect and vet to the degree possible information and make it available in a systematic fashion.

ED: And yet we know there was a lot of people, for pretty obvious reasons, who pushed back against this system, right? Can you tell us what that reaction was like?

SCOTT SANDAGE: Many people– probably most people– were quite happy about it. Others, including people who felt injured by the system or feel wronged by the system spoke out against it, wrote editorials, filed lawsuits.

The editorial that I thought might interest you the most is from a Cincinnati, Ohio paper called The Penny Press. And this was published on September 15, 1859.

The headline is Espionage at Home and Abroad. “A statement has been going the circuit of the newspapers that since Napoleon III has declared a general amnesty to all political offenders, the system of espionage is as rife as ever in France.”

“In short, that there is a policeman in almost every house and people here are correspondingly shocked at this fact. Do they not know that a system of espionage just as despotic and perhaps more potent is exercised at our own doors of which they never think of complaining?”

“By means of the mercantile agencies, the spy system is ramified throughout the whole country. The most secret actions of men– not alone in mercantile matters– but in the private life of the merchant himself are recorded on the books of those agencies and open to the inspection of whoever pays for the privilege.”

“The espionage of the mercantile agencies can blast the prospects of a merchant and ruin his character forever. The espionage of the French emperor cannot do more.”

ED: Wow. That’s amazing.

SCOTT SANDAGE: The response of the company to the push back was essentially to say, our correspondents are the finest men in every community in America. We take a very great care to ensure the confidentiality and control of the information that we collect.

And essentially they were saying trust us. We have a good purpose in mind to make doing business safer for everyone, and we are a responsible business getting information from responsible people. And we will be treat it accordingly.

ED: Scott Sandage is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. His book is Born Losers, a history of failure in America.

BRIAN: It’s time for quick break. When we get back, how J. Edgar Hoover’s passion for the card catalog reshaped the FBI.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

The FBI Figures Things Out

Brian talks with historian Beverly Gage about the breakthrough technological innovation J. Edgar Hoover brought to his work at the FBI: index card cross-referencing!

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); John Edgar Hoover; data; surveillance

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re taking a look at personal data collection– when Americans embrace it and when they hate it.

ED: One of the people who famously embraced data collection in the early 20th century was a young Department of Justice lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover.

In 1919, at the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed head of a brand new department within the Bureau of Investigation– the Radical Division.

BRIAN: Historian Beverly Gage is writing a biography of Hoover. I sat down with her recently to ask, why Hoover? What qualified this 24-year-old to take over the government surveillance of radicals?

BEVERLY GAGE: One of the things that actually made Hoover so appealing for this job was not only that he had worked in the Justice Department looking at enemy alien issues, but before that, he had earned his way through law school working at the Library of Congress.

And we don’t often think of this as being terribly revolutionary, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, libraries were devising all of these new ways of classifying information, of figuring out how to get people the books they wanted, as there are more and more and more books being printed.

BRIAN: Hey, the Dewey Decimal System. When did that start?

BEVERLY GAGE: Right. That started in the late 19th century, as did the Library of Congress System. And these are, still, in many libraries, the two main ways of classifying books.

And so when Hoover was at the Library of Congress, they were just in the process of kind of finishing this massive, massive cataloging task. So Hoover had certain skills as a lawyer, but his real skills and the thing that made him valuable was that he knew how to manage and classify information.

Because when he stepped into the Bureau, the way that he describes it, they had been kind of keeping tabs on people during the first World War, but it was all really, really disorganized.

So if you wanted some report that had come in on someone, it would take hours and hours and hours, and you’d just be going through these stacks of information. And well Hoover does is he actually systematizes that.

And the first thing that he does when he arrives is saying, we are setting up an index card system to keep track of political radicals in the United States. And that’s his first big innovation and the thing that kind of makes his name within the Bureau.

BRIAN: So what did he have on those index cards– I assume that there was an index card on individuals– that was the basic organizing principle. And what would be on the card?

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, what would happen basically was that you would have investigators out in the field and they might be undercover investigators, they might be agents of the Bureau, and they would go to a meeting or they would get a tip from someone, and they would write up a report.

And Hoover said, OK, copies of this report are going to come in here, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to figure out how we can file that report so that we can get it the moment we need it.

So he had a whole staff of people who would sit down, read through each report, and set up these index cards. So if a person’s name is mentioned in this report, the number of the report goes on that person’s index card. If there’s a particular organization mentioned there, that organization has an index card and the name of that file or the number of that file goes on that index card.

BRIAN: I see.

BEVERLY GAGE: Same thing for places, same thing for ideas. And this seems ridiculously straightforward to us, and seems like– in the age of Google, oh my gosh, how many meticulous and laborious is that? But, in fact, it was this kind of technological marvel in its moment.

BRIAN: Can you cite any breakthroughs or big busts that came as a result of his filing system? Did he cite any?

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, the funny thing is that though this is his great claim to fame, his first attempts to really do something big with this on a massive scale actually turns out to be quite a disaster.

So Hoover comes in to the Radical Division in August of 1919. As I said, he’s 24 years old. He’s very confident about his filing system. And it’s already floating through the Justice Department that what they’re going to do with all of this new information is begin a campaign of deportation against radical non-citizens– so mostly at this point anarchists and communists.

Add Hoover is basically put in charge of that effort. And so a few months into his tenure at the Radical Division, we have the first of what are known as the Palmer Raids. And those are raids on a group called the Union of Russian Workers– an anarchist organization.

And so they conduct this first round of raids in November, the second much bigger round of raids against the brand new communist parties in January of 1920. And these are massive informational enterprises, because it requires figuring out where all of these meetings are happening, getting thousands of warrants for people, and then going in and sweeping them all up.

But as it turns, the information is not so well organized. There are all sorts of people for whom they don’t have warrants. They’re sweeping up citizens and non-citizens.

And so the first attempt really to use in this kind of grand dramatic way is actually something of a failure, and has gone down as one of the great civil liberties violations in American history.

BRIAN: I’m assuming that didn’t deter Hoover’s confidence in his system.

BEVERLY GAGE: It did not deter Hoover’s confidence in his filing system, which he was very confident about for a very long time. It did, actually, teach him a lesson that a lot of this probably ought to be done, first of all, more secretly. The Palmer raids were very, very public.

And he didn’t also want the law too well defined. He wanted to be able to kind of operates in a kind of gray area where it was going to be up to the intelligence agencies, up to the intelligence establishment and up to him, in particular, to decide what was proper and what was necessary.

BRIAN: How long did the card filing system last in what became the FBI? Did it make it to the FBI in the ’30s? Did it make it beyond?

BEVERLY GAGE: Oh, yes. It made it well beyond. Hoover became actually finally director of the Bureau in 1924. And he died there, still as director of the Bureau, in 1972. And for most of that period, the card system went through some evolution, but it was the basic way that the FBI conducted its filing system.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, they were beginning to engage computer systems. But this was the basics.

BRIAN: I think they’re still beginning to engage computer systems at these–

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, exactly. These bureaucracies move slowly, and especially under J. Edgar Hoover, he has his ideas, and they stayed pretty consistent most of his life.

BRIAN: Beverly Gage in an historian at Yale University. Her forthcoming biography of J. Edgar Hoover is called G-Man.

Invasive or Illuminating?

Historian Helen Rountree and Brian discuss the use of slave records from the 19^th Century to enforce racial purity laws in 20^th Century Virginia. Peter, Ed, and Brian then discuss the re-use and repurposing of data in other settings, and how what might seem invasive at one time, can be a tool of illumination for the historian’s craft.

data; race; surveillance

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: Hoover wasn’t the only one with a penchant for filing in the 19-teens. Our next story looks at another bureaucrat who was, in some ways, a kindred spirit.

Walter Plecker was a Virginia doctor who became head of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912. Right away, he set about creating a bureaucracy worthy of the 20th century.

HELEN ROUNTREE: He insisted on better sanitation for midwives to use. He set up a system of birth certificates so that everybody could get registered.

BRIAN: This is Helen Rountree, a cultural anthropologist who studies Virginia Indian tribes. She says that Plecker’s leadership modernized the Bureau, making it more efficient and more organized. But his reformist zeal had a dark side.

HELEN ROUNTREE: He was also a racial purity nut. And he was determined, as the cliche, goes to keep the White race White.

BRIAN: Plecker’s big project was to ensure that mixed race Virginians would not enjoy the privileges reserved for Whites under Jim Crow. And the vital statistics bureau was a great place from which to run that kind of campaign.

At Vital Statistics, he had access to all sorts of data that he could use to supposedly prove somebody had African or Indian ancestry.

HELEN ROUNTREE: Now, he got the names of living people who might be, shall we say, suspicious in a number of ways. A fair number of the county court clerks were actually in sympathy with White supremacy and pure White race and all of that.

And anybody they thought was suspicious trying to register as White and not looking correct, the court was liable to turn them over to Plecker.

BRIAN: I see. So he did get tips from people on the ground.

HELEN ROUNTREE: Oh, yes. He got a lot of tips from people on the ground, and some of them were county officials. In 1943, he actually tried to expand that network. He sent out a circular listing, county by county, the surnames of people who he suspected were going to try to pass as white.

BRIAN: Let me get this straight. As late as 1943, in the midst of a war fighting Nazi Germany, Walter Plecker is sending out circulars talking about racial purity?

HELEN ROUNTREE: Yes. This was going on, parallel.

BRIAN: Boy.

HELEN ROUNTREE: In addition, Plecker welcomed tips, anonymous or otherwise, from interested citizens out in the counties. And he got a lot of these things by correspondence, and quite a few of them were just malicious.

BRIAN: Clearly the information that Plecker was operating on was suspect, to say the least.

HELEN ROUNTREE: All of it was suspect.

BRIAN: So how did he actually work? What were his techniques? They didn’t have computers in those days, and I gather that listing one’s race was rather haphazard before the 1920s?

HELEN ROUNTREE: Plecker relied on two major sets of records. One set of records were the US Census population schedules. The other set of records was to be found in the county courthouses.

In 1853, Virginia issued registers to all the county courthouses. And by that, I made great big books that were called registers– birth registers, marriage registers, death registers.

Those registers usually had racial designations in them. So of course when Plecker decided to begin having research done, he sent his people out to get all the information he could from those registers.

BRIAN: Were there other forms of data that he used?

HELEN ROUNTREE: In the county courthouses, there was another kind of record made, and that was the register of free Negroes. He had to get a certificate stating that they were of free birth, otherwise they could be kidnapped and sold into slavery.

The law about that went in in 1806. Plecker was able to get copies of those registers– every county had one. And then if he got a tip later and he could have his people trace geologically back to a free negro register, he had that present-day person as a person of African ancestry.

BRIAN: Let me get this straight, Helen. You’re saying that data that was used to ensure the liberty of free blacks in the early 1800s was turned against African Americans 100 years later.

HELEN ROUNTREE: Yes.

BRIAN: Do you have any examples of how Plecker’s interventions affected the lives of individuals?

HELEN ROUNTREE: There was an Eastern Chickahominy family living in Hampton. The father of it was the ticket agent at the railroad station. His children were in the White schools.

But Plecker intervened in the late 1920s, and he had the school board remove all of this family’s children from the White public schools.

BRIAN: Wow.

HELEN ROUNTREE: It was done on a school day. The kids were simply hoicked out of the classroom. It was all humiliating. The reason for it was made plain either then or immediately afterwards, and the kids were sent to the colored school.

And at that time, the county, Elizabeth City County, spent nine times as much per pupil on White students as on Black students.

BRIAN: What became of Walter Plecker? When did he retire?

HELEN ROUNTREE: He retired in 1946, and within a very few months, he was hit by a truck crossing the street.

BRIAN: Dare I ask the race of the person driving the truck?

HELEN ROUNTREE: I’ve never been able to find out, but I know a lot of people who wish they were behind the wheel.

BRIAN: Helen ROUNTREE is Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology at Old Dominion University. She wrote about Walter Plecker in her book Pocahontas’s People.

Ed, Peter, there’s so much to talk about in that interview. But what strikes me as particularly relevant right now given the controversy over the way the NSA is collecting and using data is the unintended consequences of collecting data in the first place– the way data is collected for one reason back in 1806 and then, a century later, put to completely different uses by a completely different set of people interested in completely different things.

PETER: Right. Well, we’ve always been a data generating people. We need to record every transaction from birth to death to property transactions.

So you have all those data points out there, and they may seem pointless to us, but then they can be assembled and are assembled. And, you know, it’s not always for maligned purposes.

So I’ll give you a case in point. You think about freedom suits in early Virginia, and you think about people with Indian ancestry who were enslaved are establishing their ancestry beginning with a free Native American woman– an Indian woman.

And that’s a legitimate grounds to sue for your freedom. And what’s amazing to us– we think of Virginia slave society as this totalistic and unjust system, and, of course, it is, but there’s room to wiggle. There’s room to move if you can establish the documents. If you’ve got the data.

BRIAN: If you’ve got the data.

PETER: And you can be freed. And it seems, in some ways, to be just a complete flip from what you’re describing where the taint, the faint suggestion of one drop of Black blood makes you–

BRIAN: But the data are the same.

PETER: It’s the same data.

BRIAN: They don’t change– that’s the history and the interpretation.

PETER: That’s right. They’re neutral.

ED: You know, Peter you talk about the neutrality of this evidence and how it turns out to be this force for great evil, really– the 20th century and using this to disrupt these people’s lives.

But as you know, I’m always trying to look on the bright side.

BRIAN: Make lemonade out of this one. Go ahead.

ED: Well, it’s interesting to think about these very records that Peter’s talking about all the way back in the 17th century that are first beginning to separate out who might be Negro and White and doing all that.

And our very own tribe of historians has come back and used those records with remarkable skill to bring to life people who are otherwise completely forgotten.

PETER: Yeah. It’s a process of what historians call records stripping, when you have a variety of data points that just seem random and they don’t add up to anything. And you have to pull them together. Then they add up to something. Then you might even reconstruct the life of an individual. It’s quite amazing.

ED: But ironically, the method is that of Plecker.

BRIAN: Yeah, that’s it.

PETER: That’s record stripping, yeah.

ED: And triangulating all of these different kinds of evidence, of connecting things that would not have been connected at the moment of creation to recreate somebody in the past–

BRIAN: Which sounds to me like exactly what the NSA is doing today.

ED: Well, it’s funny you’d say that, Brian, because there’s a hilarious blog post that’s come out recently that actually imagines what if the people at the time of the American Revolution had had the techniques of the NSA today and they could uncover the conspiracy that was roiling the North American continent.

BRIAN: Yeah. This was posted by a sociologist named Karen Healy, and it’s about the run up to the Revolution in Boston. That was a conspiracy against legitimate authority.

Now remember, this is from a British point of view. And what we do in order to find out who is behind all this, who is the terrorist that we need to capture– because that’s what the British are interested in. They want to hang the people who are responsible for this, because they’re traitors.

So you do this metadata analysis. You get all the groups that have revolutionary leanings– Tea Party types, the Long Room Club, Saint Andrew’s Club, the Loyal Nine. A whole bunch of them.

ED: That sounds very threatening.

BRIAN: Yeah. OK, so you find out who has membership in what group, how they overlap, how they could be connected through groups or as individuals. You don’t look at any communications. You can’t tap the wires, you can’t–

ED: No purloining necessary.

PETER: No, nothing. All you know is who is connected with whom by some close association. You put it in motion, mix and stir, and what you end up with is– and this is the punchline, so hold onto your tri-cornered hats– who is the chief terrorist?

BRIAN: Sam Adams.

PETER: Close, but no cigar.

BRIAN: Or beer.

PETER: It’s Paul Revere, OK? It’s nothing he said. They don’t have him on tape. You don’t have him saying, I am a terrorist. But you could identify him from the outside in using this metadata.

BRIAN: It sounds like guilt by association to me, guys.

PETER: It is all about association. It’s called social network analysis.

ED: And that’s kind of a new frontier, guys, in the social history of coming back in, of finding the networks among abolitionists or among authors in the Antebellum Period.

PETER: And there you go again, Ed. You’re taking this nasty thing, all this metadata analysis we’re also upset about now, and you saying, hooray, this is going to be an historian’s tool.

BRIAN: He thinks like that, Peter.

ED: I’ve never metadata I didn’t like!

BRIAN: I’ve met a lot of dates who didn’t like me, Ed.

PETER: [LAUGHING]

What Can’t You Ask on the Census?

Historian Kevin Schultz talks with Brian about the controversy surrounding a proposed question on religious affiliation for the 1960 Census, and why it sparked very different reactions within the Catholic and Jewish communities.

data; demography; religion; surveillance

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the T keeping tabs. We’re looking at times when Americans have gone to great lengths to keep an eye on each other and how they’ve justified doing so.

BRIAN: In the late 1950s, the Census Bureau unwittingly ignited a major controversy about how much information gathering is too much. They proposed adding one very simple question to the 1960 Census. What is your religion?

PETER: This question has never been on the Census before. And organizations like the a ACLU were immediately suspicious. Were an individual person’s religious beliefs really any of the government’s business?

BRIAN: But one group, Catholics, saw this as a golden opportunity. In the pages of major newspapers, Catholic organizations made a practical argument for the new question. They said that they needed better demographic information about their parishioners. They needed up-to-date data that would help them build parochial schools and hospitals right where they were needed.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: They also had sort of another argument that you see in the archives BUT you don’t see in the public releases.

BRIAN: This is Karen Schultz, an historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: And this was sort of a deeper question about Catholics’ place in America. Catholics were always thought of as something less than Americans, a group that couldn’t necessarily participate in free-thinking democracy because they were subject to the orders of their priests or their bishops or their archbishops.

BRIAN: Sure. This is a huge issue even for John F. Kennedy when he runs for the presidency.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Absolutely. And this debate happens right before– this is three, four years before John F. Kennedy runs. And Catholics see this as, well, if we get all this data, we’ll show how good Catholics have been.

They’ve been excellent taxpayers in the democratic society. They’ve been participants in several of the largest cities and civic undertakings in American history. And if they were able to show that they were more numerous in those big Northeastern cities that were still the cultural capitals the United States– cities like Chicago and New York and Boston– then they might be able to exert their political strength.

BRIAN: And what is the actual language they used internally to argue for this?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Well, of the largest force sort of backing this question was this organization called the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the NCWC– basically the political arm of the Catholic Church in America.

And so in these NCWC documents that I dug up in the archives, they say things like Catholics should use every proper lobbying technique available to get this question affected it on the 1960 Census.

They identified groups out there that will come out against this, and we need to counteract the actions of those groups. And the group, of course, is unnamed. We know that it’ll turn out to be the Jews.

BRIAN: So tell me about the religious opposition to putting this question on the Census.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: So the collection of Jewish organizations– the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee– all sorts of these organizations start crafting a defense against including this question on the 1960 Census.

They start writing letters to the newspapers, they start writing letters to the Census Bureau. And they craft an argument that basically circles around the First Amendment, that because people who choose not to answer questions in a decennial Census will be punished by law, we will be forced to reveal where all the Jews live, where all the minority religious organizations live, and this will impede in people’s willingness to practice those faiths.

BRIAN: Wow.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Now, you have to understand the specter of the Holocaust is hovering over all of us, and Nazi Germany used census bureaus and computerized data tablets and things like that in order to identify and locate Jews and other persecuted minorities.

And Jews are not afraid to make these arguments. They’ll say things like look at what happened in Nazi Germany if you’re not concerned about government tabulating data on what kind of person you are and what kind of things you believe.

BRIAN: So Kevin, I understand that one of the concerns for some of the Jewish groups was combining all the data in the Census is to provide a profile by religion– I think it’s referred to as cross-tabulation. So you could put together the fact that somebody was Jewish and their occupation, for instance.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the primary concerns. I have a letter from a rabbi from Philadelphia who asks, do you want the following questions answered by no less an authority than the US Government?

What is the average Jewish income? How many Jewish bankers are there in the US?

BRIAN: Wow.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: So they were extremely concerned about cross-tabulations, especially for the reason stated there, that, just at this moment where they were being finally socially accepted, all of a sudden this data would come out revealing questions about Jewish income, Jewish banking.

BRIAN: And showing them to be really different than other Americans.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: In all the worst ways that the stereotypes had this.

BRIAN: Yes.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Yeah, absolutely.

BRIAN: So what kinds of techniques did the Jewish organizations use to enter the battle?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: The first thing they do is they cause such a stink that it poses the threat of disrupting the actual 1960 Census itself.

BRIAN: In essence, they’re threatening civil disobedience, really. Go ahead. This is wrong, go ahead. Arrest me for not answering the question.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Exactly. Me and not only the 3% of Americans that are Jews, but we’re going to go around and cause a big stink so that people will also refuse to answer questions about the highest level of grade completed, what kind of occupation they have– things like that that make people feel like the government is getting a little too close to their own personal interests.

So the Census Bureau is petrified that Americans will just refused to answer the question, and they don’t want to go around persecuting all these Americans for refusing to do it. They really encourage people to do it, and they don’t want it to be sort of a negative thing.

And actually this threat that there will be the civil disobedience and that Americans in mass will refuse to answer the Census question is enough of a threat to scare the Census Bureau.

So in 1957, they actually declare that they will not have a question on religion in the 1960 Census. So that happens very, very quickly.

Now, there’s a little kink in the story, which is while this debate was going on, the Census Bureau was starting to learn how to gather data. And how they do that is by posing questions in the field. So they did a couple surveys, some very small surveys– one of 431 homes in the Milwaukee area and then a much larger one of about 40,000 homes across the United States.

BRIAN: So this is before the issue was decided and they’re beginning to test how they would ask this question?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Exactly. So they encouraged the debate, and while the debate is going on, they also start testing questions in the field. So they collect this data in 1957, and this has all the cross-tabulations that the Jewish groups are fearful for.

And what the Census Bureau recognizes is that this is a contentious debate right now. And what they decide to do is release two reports. The first report is just going to be a couple pages. You can find it at your local library now. And it’s just going to talk about the number of Jews, the number of Catholics, generally where they live.

But they’re not going to have the cross-tabulation data on income and profession– things like that that the Jewish organizations are concerned about.

And what this first report does for American Jewish groups is it makes them hypersensitive about the second report that’s going to come out that’s going to have all the cross-tabulation data.

So this is where their second technique comes in. What they do is they look for– and this is quoting– “like-minded others who are going to be opposed to the tabulation of religious data.”

And basically they go through their American history textbook and see which religious groups, except for the Catholics, had been persecuted. And they start writing letters to the leaders of those organizations.

They find out that there’s a senator from Utah who’s Mormon, and they write letters saying, you don’t want the American government finding out where all the Mormons are and how much money they make and where they live and how many children they have– these kinds of things.

And sure enough, this second strategy is incredibly effective. All of a sudden, this becomes sort of a national debate in the halls of Congress. And then the second report, which they said was delayed because of rewriting, sits and sits and sits in the Bureau of the Census Hall for up to two months.

And then finally, two months later, a very plain letter comes that you can look in the archives and see, and it says, “In consultation with the president, we’ve decided that we are not going to release the second report.”

BRIAN: Wow.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Well, this leads to this incredible scene where the head of the Census, Robert Burgess and Conrad Taeuber, have already been invited to go to the conference of the American Sociological Association to talk about the data.

And they get up there in front of their panel and they basically read the report saying we’re not allowed to talk about the data that we had intended to talk about. And people ask them questions, and they say repeatedly no comment, no comment, no comment.

So the sociologists get angry. They say, this is the first time that the federal government has actually gone through the process of writing a report and then suppressed it due to politics.

BRIAN: Yeah. So you’ve referred to politics. Kevin, was there something about the argument made by the Jewish groups opposing asking this question that really resonated more broadly that helped them win the day?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: I think the Jewish organizations recognized the importance of falling back on the strong American tradition of liberal individualism, of we are all individuals, we do not want to have a large entity like the government looking over our shoulder the whole time and placing us in whatever groups it sees fit.

So they used this language, citing the First Amendment right to privacy, citing the fact that Americans are standing on their own as individuals.

Catholics, on the other hand, they were pulling from a different American tradition. Catholics themselves have a longstanding history of advocating the benefits of a community and talking in terms of is it good for the lowest member of the community as well as the well-to-do members of the community.

And so Catholics were much less interested in the concern about an individual having their privacy impinged upon and more interested in the question of how will this data help the community? Where should we place the schools? Where should we place these hospitals?

But I think the communal argument that the Catholics were making lost out a bit perhaps because of the language of the Cold War that was then going on, where communism is, by definition, sort of a communal way of structuring your economy. And here in America, we’re opposed all things communist, so therefore we can’t side with that kind of argument.

BRIAN: Kevil Schultz is an historian at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His book is Tri-Faith America– How Catholics and Jews Held Post-War America to its Protestant Promise.

You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

Private investigator Ron Brown walks Brian and Ed through the process of tracking people down, how technology has dramatically reshaped his profession since the 1970s, and why – no matter what you do – he can still find you!

data; digitization; surveillance; technology

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

ED: You may be wondering just how much of your own personal information is out there in a database somewhere. So we put in a call to a man who knows the answer.

Ron Brown is a skip tracer– somebody who finds people who skip town to avoid paying their debts. When he got started in the business in the 1970s, he relied on the telephone and on his wits.

RON BROWN: When I got in the industry in 1973, the primary tool that we used was the telephone book or information. If we can get a telephone number for you, we can break the number. It would go to a physical address and we knew where you were. If we could get your employment number, we could break that number.

BRIAN: How would you get those numbers in the first place, assuming a person had disconnected their phone?

RON BROWN: When a person would fill out a credit application or something, they would list relatives and references. Good skip tracers would have to talk to those people and get them to give them the information.

Now, there were no laws protecting information at that time. So many, many scams were used. You’d call somebody up and tell them that you with the high school reunion group or that you had a check to deliver to them.

There’s was all kinds of scams. I’ve never been a user nor believer in scams. I found that in the skip tracing process back then when I had to talk to people, I was always Ronnie. And Ronnie creates a picture of a young, non-threatening person which people will give information to. We’re taught to help young people. But in the ’70s, it was all done telephonically.

BRIAN: Let’s flash forward to 2013. Without giving way too many trade secrets, what is that same process of finding someone who skipped out on a debt they owe look like?

RON BROWN: Cyber tractors. Where once you left a paper trail, you now leave electronic trails. There’s all types of social science, there’s all kind of data stored on you on the internet. It’s unbelievable.

I would tell you this. With your name and the city you live in, within five minutes, I can have your Social Security Number, I can tell you where you live, when you bought your house, how big your house is, how many bathrooms you have, who financed it, how much money you owe on it.

Within 24 hours, I can tell you every bank account, checking accounts, savings account, stocks, bonds– anything that you have under that Social Security Number.

BRIAN: So give us a couple of examples of how you would find out what kind of house I live in and how to go about collecting from me.

RON BROWN: I go to a database called Master Files. I would put your name in and the city you live in. If I had your Social Security Number. That is going to give me information on you. It’ll give me your current telephone number.

These data brokers buy this information from various sources. If you order pizza, that pizza company– that’s proprietary data that you sell them, your address and phone number.

If you fill out warranty cards, the information you put on that warranty card becomes proprietary data. They own it. There’s no law protecting it. And they’re allowed to sell it. There’s big money in that.

Any information that you give to any lender, unless you op out under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act– and the act was written backwards, in my opinion. The way the law was written, it says they can sell it unless you tell them not to.

BRIAN: And what do you have to do to opt out? I confess. I didn’t even know I could opt out.

RON BROWN: Every year, every credit card company, every bank, every finance company, they have to send you an opt-out notice. It’s usually buried on the back of your bill. But, we’re lazy. I’m in the industry. I’ve never opted out of anything.

So that’s the first place I would go to establish a background on you. Then I would go to social science. And there’s one called Spokeo. And if you’re a member of any– if you’re LinkedIn, if you’re Facebook, if you’re MySpace– it will show every single thing you belong to you. And I can go in there and gather all that data. Now, you may be hiding from me.

BRIAN: I didn’t plan to, but actually now I’m thinking about it.

RON BROWN: You may set your profile to be restricted. I can only see if I’m your friend. I can’t ask to be your friend. It’d be violating the law. But what I can do is look at your friends. They’re not hiding. And all their messages are on there.

We found gentleman a while back who was running with a $90,000 Porsche, and we were always one step behind him, always.

BRIAN: Well, it’s a fast car.

RON BROWN: There was no pattern to what he was doing. We checked his Facebook, and we saw where his friends were talking about meeting on Saint Patrick’s Day at a bar in Boston.

So we had pictures of him that he had posted on the internet. We sent those pictures to an investigator in Boston. They staked out the bar that everybody was going to meet at. They saw him. They followed him to an apartment complex where he was staying with his friend, and there was the $90,000 Porsche.

And the next day, we had helped that gentleman get back on his feet, literally.

BRIAN: I love that phrase.

ED: Let’s just imagine that I’d like to skip town. What should I do to make sure that an unscrupulous version of you can’t find me?

RON BROWN: You can’t. If you think you have privacy in America today, you’re living in a world with a pink sky. You can run, but you can’t hide.

BRIAN: Ron Brown is a skip tracer in Oklahoma City.