They’ve been listening for longer than you think. A new history reveals how—and why.

Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early twentieth century—and they have spied on their own customers too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here?

In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government’s wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike.

From wayward lovers to foreign spies, from private detectives to public officials, and from the silver screen to the Supreme Court, The Listeners traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States. Along the way, Brian Hochman considers how earlier generations of Americans confronted threats to privacy that now seem more urgent than ever.

"Smart, entertaining, and occasionally alarming…Hochman narrates a century and a half of wiretapping, from the Civil War to the War on Terror. What emerges is a powerful prehistory of today’s private sector and government surveillance regimes. Hochman reveals the surprising strength of public resistance to all forms of electronic surveillance until the 1960s. And, crucially, he shows how national leaders used the racial backlash politics of the late 1960s to normalize government eavesdropping and build the world we live in today." - New Republic

"[This] thoughtful, searching history reminds us that the practice of wiretapping was steeped from the start in lawlessness…Wiretapping, in the public’s mind, was what crooks did…The Listeners does a wonderful job evoking a world shaped by intense distaste for surveillance, even if the sharp emotions that once energized the battle now seem lost to history." - Washington Post

"Since 9/11, wiretapping in the United States has largely been viewed as the preserve of the ‘national security state.’ In The Listeners, Brian Hochman suggests a revisionist reading, in which wiretapping is diffused throughout US society, from ‘private ears’ snooping on cheating spouses to corporations fishing for dirt on rivals and police eavesdropping on poor Black communities." - Times Literary Supplement

"The fraught relationship between privacy and security is at the crux of The Listeners, which covers the history of eavesdropping from the Civil War to 9/11. Throughout that long history, the threat—real or imagined—of crime almost invariably took priority over civil liberties. Racist dog whistles shaped surveillance laws in 1968, and people of color historically bore the brunt (and still do) of police surveillance." - The Nation

"Chronicles how electronic surveillance became ‘normalized’ in the U.S.…For Hochman, the history of wiretapping ultimately feeds into the larger racial tragedy of mass incarceration and overcriminalization." - New Yorker

"Hochman makes a compelling case that concerns about threats to privacy that had been widely shared by Americans were pushed to the margins by claims that eavesdropping was necessary to enforce Prohibition, defeat drug dealers, prevent race riots, and protect national security…An engaging and informative account of wiretapping in American popular culture." - Psychology Today

"A fascinating look at the battle between surveillance and privacy in the United States over the past 150 years." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"[A] fascinating history [of] how wiretapping by U.S. law enforcement agencies went from a ‘dirty business’ to a ‘standard investigative tactic.’…This is an essential and immersive look at ‘what happens when we sideline privacy concerns in the interest of profit motives and police imperatives.’" - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A fun read…This is a history of uneasiness and discomfort with the way an emerging technology can reshape the nature of private and public life…Show[s] how the United States became a nation of proud ‘freedom lovers’ who also willingly accept Facebook and Google making fortunes from their data. For anyone looking for a prehistory of the ambivalent and paradoxical aspects of American thought around digital surveillance, this is your book." - History Today

"The moral of The Listeners’s 150-year history is what Hochman calls the devastating ‘banality of electronic surveillance in America.’ Espionage was and remains dependent on technologies so central to everyday life they appear mundane—and it has always hinged on the work of ordinary people who, for better or worse, often consider their labor anything but extraordinary. Today, high-tech surveillance perniciously extends state power precisely because so many of us are bound up in its mechanizations, whether we want to be or not." - Boston Review

"Hochman narrates a history of surveillance in the United States…The Listeners is also a story about technology and the challenges around controlling or regulating it as it evolves." - PopMatters

"[The Listeners] deserves to be read widely…Hochman’s book constitutes a superb contribution to a topic that is in desperate need of scholarly attention." - Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

"Hochman has skilfully contributed to understanding the phenomenon of wiretapping as a dirty business during the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ways it evolved and flourished as a lawless tool in America both within and outside the state." - Technology and Culture