The Societal Costs of Surveillance

It was 1992, and I had been renting her apartment in Prague for about a year. I had gone to the former Eastern Bloc shortly after graduate school on a United States government fellowship, and I felt it my duty to show by example how the free world worked. I thought I had been a model tenant. I kept the place neat, I paid my rent faithfully, I even made sure to put out fresh flowers when I knew she was coming over.

But that was the problem: I didn't always know she was coming over. She used to come in when I wasn't home, on tips from the neighbors.

When Helena — my age and, I thought, my friend — came that night to tell me to leave, she laid down a litany of charges: You shower too often. You talk on the phone late at night. You leave your pajamas out and the bed unmade. You've had men here. You have a cat.

Oddly, that was the charge that stunned me most. I had minded a friend's cat for a weekend once. How could she possibly know all this, I wondered. The neighbors had told her, I learned. They had called her to say I had a cat.

It had never occurred to me the elderly lady next door was spying. Nor did I think anything of the woman who seemed always to be on the landing when I came and went, which must seem incredibly naïve. After all, everyone knew the Communists snitched on one another, right? But I never thought they'd spy on me. There was nothing interesting about my life. I had nothing to hide and I wasn't doing anything wrong. But I was different: single, a woman, a foreigner. And that was enough to get me watched.

So the recent brainstorm by the Justice Department to enlist couriers, meter readers, cable installers and telephone repairmen to snoop on people's private lives for anything "suspicious" dredged a cold and until now forgotten feeling from the pit of my stomach. Many have objected that such a program would violate civil liberties and basic American principles. But stoking people's fear to set neighbor upon neighbor, service worker upon client, those who belong against those who don't, does something more: it erodes the soul of the watcher and the watched, replacing healthy national pride with mute suspicion, breeding insular individuals more concerned with self-preservation than with society at large. Ultimately it creates a climate that is inherently antithetical to security.