Wiretapping StuffNotes on Sound, Sense, and Technical Infrastructure

This article reconsiders key concepts in the field of sound studies in light of new theories of media materialism. My focus is on the relationship between electronic eavesdropping and technical infrastructure, a foundational area of modern media culture that has long proved difficult to assimilate into received models of inquiry. Before launching into my analysis, I want to offer two brief stories as points of departure.

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Story number one is about a rogue stock broker named D. C. Williams, who was at one time the most notorious professional eavesdropper in the United States. Williams made his name by tapping into the electronic communications of several prominent business entities based in California, intercepting secrets about board decisions and financial performance. He then relayed that information to a group of paying subscribers, who in turn made financial moves based on the intelligence that Williams had gathered. The genius of the scheme wasn't just that it allowed Williams to eavesdrop on confidential conversations. It also capitalized on the time it takes to send an electronic message across a region as vast as that of the continental United States (a short period of time but a period of time nonetheless). Using highly sophisticated techniques, Williams found a way to communicate inside information with his syndicate while slowing the speed with which the original corporate messages reached their intended destinations. His subscribers could buy and sell stocks before anyone else on the East Coast, taking advantage of illegal tips while appearing to go along with the daily fluctuations of the market.

The scheme proved lucrative. Williams's correspondence, later confiscated by authorities, revealed that the members of his syndicate had made a small fortune in the short time the wiretapping conspiracy was up and running. But the setup proved too good to be true. Acting on inside information of their own, authorities nabbed Williams in the act of tapping the corporate network. He was soon prosecuted and convicted under an obscure California statute prohibiting the interception of electronic messages. Reporters covering the story deemed it a "new chapter in crime," a reminder that eavesdropping was an inevitable byproduct of the age of electronic communications.¹

The year—and here's the twist to the story—was 1864.

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tory number two takes place almost 150 years later. In June 2013 Edward Snowden, former National Security Administration (NSA) contractor turned whistleblower, revealed that the US government was monitoring the world's digital communications by tapping into a vast network of undersea cables that spanned the globe. The program was called Upstream, and the name—by turns a technical designation for a type of electronic eavesdropping and a handle for a suite of clandestine NSA programs that employ it widely—soon became synonymous with warrantless government surveillance in the United States. On the heels of widespread outrage over PRISM, a massive data-sharing program between the NSA and nine major US Internet companies, revelations about Upstream gave many Americans the impression that no trace of digital data was beyond the state's reach.

Upstream wasn't an unprecedented government surveillance program. The NSA had been regularly tapping undersea telecommunications networks since the early 1970s. But in order to understand the type of surveillance the NSA was doing in 2013, you needed to know something about how we communicate digitally, a tall order for those of us who take the technical workings of the Internet for granted. News coverage of the Upstream revelations typically resorted to a stock set of figures to help the average US citizen grasp what was at stake. We were told that 550,000 miles of undersea fiber-optic cable connects the world's Internet users. Upward of 99 percent of transcontinental Internet traffic travels through those cables on any given day. By tapping into the undersea network at strategic choke points—physical sites at which fiber-optic cables either intersect or surface on land—the federal government could monitor vast amounts of digital data.²

The name of the Upstream program contained hints about the technical processes that enabled its use. If communicating...