Volume 2, Number 9 · June 11, 1964
Looking Backward
By Jason Epstein
The Privacy Invaders
by Myron Brenton
Coward McCann, 240 pp., $4.95
The Naked Society
by Vance Packard
David McKay, 369 pp., $5.95
What Is Conservatism?
edited by Frank S. Meyer
Rinehart Holt, 242 pp., $4.95
The Conservative Papers
Introduction by Representative Melvin Laird
Doubleday Anchorbook, 268 pp., $1.45
In his book on the invasion of privacy Myron Brenton, a former private detective, now presumably repentant, suggests with alarm that a consolidated record of a man's life can soon be compiled from his Internal Revenue file, his bank statements, his credit card receipts, his telephone bills, etc. so that his privacy may be made to vanish without his even having known what happened. Since the intimate records of our private lives are no longer our exclusive property, it follows, Mr. Brenton feels, that our constitutional protection from unwarranted search and seizure has become an academic matter. Mr. Brenton's book is a superficial but earnest report of how private citizens are spied upon by their government, their employers, their insurance companies, the stores they shop in, and even the charitable organizations that solicit money from them: outrages which have lately been implemented by the invention—often in connection with the work of real spies—of tiny cameras, hidden microphones, ingenious mirrors, and electronic systems of cross-filing. That despite all these devices the ubiquitous Vance Packard was presumably able, while Mr. Brenton was writing his book, to go unnoticed while preparing one of his own on the same subject, gives the worried reader reason to hope that the situation may not be so bad as these two writers think.
Review, 2725 words
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