Today, the issues of privacy, identity theft, and surveillance seem to be in the news all the time, but our current “surveillance society” has been developing for many decades, aided by new technologies. Wiretapping, that is, secretly intercepting messages carried on wires, began as early as the U.S. Civil War, when both sides tapped into the other’s telegraph lines. The advent of the telephone made wiretapping somewhat more difficult, as the rate of information flow on the telephone was much faster. For many years, in fact, there was no easy way to record telephone calls, so that detectives and law enforcement officials who wanted to listen in had to transcribe conversations in shorthand.