"In America’s Panopticon"

From The Nation, Dec. 6, 2018:

When the Social Security program launched in the mid-1930s, it was the concept of the SSN—the Social Security number, that unique identifier tagged to each American citizen—that captured the public imagination as much as the new entitlement itself. For opponents of Social Security, the number was evidence of state overreach. Republicans compared it to the Nazi registration laws of 1933 and warned that citizens would be forced to wear dog tags stamped with it. Meanwhile, New Deal Democrats did everything they could to avoid the image of fascist regimentation. Anxious about the dog-tag charge in particular, the Social Security Board abandoned its original plan to issue SSNs on metal tokens, instead opting for the flimsy paper cards we still use today.

What both Republicans and Democrats missed in these debates, however, was how enthusiastically citizens would embrace their SSNs. Viewing the number as proof of economic security and political belonging, Americans worried about what would happen if their card was damaged or they forgot their number. A small industry cropped up to offer more durable alternatives to the paper card: Consumers could purchase bronze-plated SSNs or birthstone rings emblazoned with their nine digits. The tattoo industry in the 1930s also experienced a boom, with some people opting to have their SSN inked onto their arm or chest. If the Social Security number posed a risk to privacy by making citizens more visible to the administrative state, this was a risk that, for much of the SSN’s history, seemed worth taking.

In her new book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, historian Sarah Igo uses examples like the SSN to examine how generations of Americans have responded to new forms of public visibility. From her engaging and wide-ranging study, a central lesson emerges: Technologies of surveillance that seem relatively innocuous at first can take 20, or 40, or 100 years to reveal their more insidious potential—by which point they have long since insinuated themselves into our daily lives, so that there is often very little we can do about them.

Americans in the 1930s had good reason to embrace their SSNs; they also could not have imagined the wealth of personal data that would be tied to those numbers by the 1970s, when the American Medical Association worried about the use of the Social Security number in health records, or by 2014, when Americans concerned about surveillance cited their SSN as being particularly sensitive. All this poses a vital question for today’s left: How can contemporary progressives, the inheritors of the New Deal, promote new social entitlements but avoid laying the groundwork for a later escalation of surveillance?

The history of privacy in America has always comprised two distinct histories: one about the rise of self-disclosure, the other about the rise of surveillance. In The Known Citizen, Igo sets out to show that those who oppose increasing surveillance have often—but not always—defended privacy on egalitarian grounds, seeking to protect the personal rights of immigrants, women, people of color, and workers from state and corporate power. Meanwhile, those who oppose increasing self-disclosure have typically defended privacy on more conservative grounds, seeking to preserve bourgeois conceptions of propriety and traditional (often hierarchical) gender and social relations.

The concept of privacy made its first formal appearance in American law in 1890, when Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published their famous essay “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. The Boston lawyers were spurred to action by the growth of the tabloid press, which reported on the personal affairs of Gilded Age families. But although they were fiercely defensive of their own privacy, Warren, Brandeis, and other members of their class would show little concern for that of the less privileged. When immigrants, radicals, and union members were subjected to new policing techniques in the early 20th century, few distinguished jurists spoke up in defense of their legal right to privacy. Indeed, it was only in 1920—when cabbies went on strike to protest a mandatory fingerprinting program—that such a legal right was claimed by members of the working classes. Needless to say, those refusing to be fingerprinted were defending privacy on rather different grounds than Warren and Brandeis; where the latter were worried about scandal and impropriety, the workers were worried about their political and economic freedom.

Those who followed Warren and Brandeis’s example in using privacy as a cudgel to protect propriety were scandalized, Igo tells us, by the birth of reality television in the 1970s and ’80s and by the tell-all memoir boom of the 1990s; they became apoplectic about the rise of contemporary social media. Although these anxieties evolved across the decades, they retained the bourgeois sensibility of Warren and Brandeis’s era. Opponents of self-disclosure were concerned about opening the sacred space of the middle-class home to television cameras; they fretted about improper self-revelation and photographs shared “in poor taste.”

These privacy proponents also retained the patriarchal gender politics of an earlier time, and many on the left chafed against efforts to protect privacy for that reason. American elites in the late 19th century, for example, complained about the circulation of photographs of their “wife, daughter, mother, or sister,” leading Congress to introduce a so-called “Bill to Protect Ladies” in 1888. It was this paternalistic regulation that feminists sought to counter in the 1960s, retaking control over how women shared their own stories and with whom. The LGBTQ movement also seized on this rhetoric, arguing that queer people should break the social taboos that kept them in the shadows and in the closet....MORE