WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
The wiretap was invented, predictably, by the government, and it even predates the telephone. During the Civil War, Union spies tapped telegraph lines to monitor Confederate communications as well as the correspondence of folks the Lincoln administration considered to be seditious.
Few scientific debates are as filthy as the gutter fight over who invented the telephone. Thomas Edison has a claim, but he was a notorious bastard with a habit of sabotaging other people’s work. Elisha Gray built a prototype phone in 1876, which may have been the first phone actually built, but Alexander Graham Bell filed the first patent for the telephone the same year.
A mere thirteen years later, a method of recording telephone conversations was invented, and the era of the phone tap began. The potential of it as an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement tool was seen immediately. By the mid-1890s, when less than 1 percent of the population of the United States even had a telephone, law enforcement was already tapping telecommunications. The government has been a fiend for it ever since.
The span of years from Prohibition through the middle of the Vietnam War was the golden age of wiretapping. In the twenties and thirties, the wiretap was an obscure technology, and owning a telephone was still a relative luxury. Bootleggers relied on the telephone as a fast, reliable means of secure communication until the law started taking them down with their own recorded conversations. During World War II, foreign spies operating on American soil were a clear and present danger, which led to widespread wiretapping. Later in the century, Martin Luther King’s telephones were tapped, which was obviously a good use of government resources because that guy was super dangerous. Until 1967, wiretapping didn’t even require a warrant—just permission from the boss (Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the case of the King tap) and cooperation from the phone company.
The obligation to obtain a warrant didn’t end the government’s love affair with phone tapping, as Watergate and the NSA scandal show, but it did temper the passion somewhat. American telecommunications has gone from being like the pee troughs at ball parks, where just anyone can check out your junk, to being more like a stall, where you at least have a reasonable expectation of privacy.