How Long Have They Been Spying On Us?
Spies have been around as long as governments, although in days of yore their work was always up close and therefore dangerous.
The first telephone call ever was made by the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell on March 10, 1876. This was not the first electronic communication ever, by a long way. Samuel Morse (of Morse code fame) sent the first telegraph on May 24, 1844. This new technology not only allowed rapid communication locally, nationally and worldwide but also allowed people, and most especially governments, to spy on us with ease, largely without risk of detection, and in the case of the latter, with total impunity.
In 2013, the heroic Edward Snowden revealed to the world at large that the NSA had been spying on US citizens with impunity. The general public may have been surprised at the detail of the information the authorities keep on us, but the fact that there was a massive worldwide network that did so was exposed seven years before Snowden was born.
In May 1976, the London listings magazine Time Out published The Eavesdroppers, which although compiled from information in the public domain was blown up into a major security scare.
Long before that though, the monitoring of international communications and even the hacking of military signals was well known. The name Bletchley Park springs to mind. That was military stuff, vital to the war effort, but what about spying on ordinary people? The article below appeared on the front page of the DAILY HERALD newspaper, February 17, 1947.
That’s right, even then the police could trace a phone call made from a public phone box on a whim, and without any sort of warrant. For a bomb threat, fake accident or some such, that is forgivable, but don’t think they haven’t been doing this routinely for decades.