The extent of Western Union’s actions might never be entirely known, since in response to a congressional inquiry the company destroyed most of its relevant records. Western Union was a known ally of the Republican Party, but the Democrats of the day had no choice but to use its wires, which put them at a disadvantage for example, Republicans won the contested election of 1876 thanks in part to an intercepted telegraph. Western Union was accused of intercepting and reading its customers’ telegraphs for both political and financial purposes (what’s now considered insider trading). What we now call electronic privacy first became an issue in the eighteen-seventies, after Western Union, the earliest and, in some ways, the most terrifying of the communications monopolies, achieved dominion over the telegraph system. But we will always face a trade-off: more centralization and concentration means convenience for consumers, but it also makes government surveillance and censorship easier. We can concede that Google is superior to Archie-Veronica. In the nineties, tapping the Web, if not impossible, was certainly a pain, which is not to say that the Web itself was better for users. Finally, for a government wiretapper, there was no continuity: with firms rising and falling, a wiretap might go down with the company. Even getting at e-mail was more difficult in those days, with hundreds of I.S.P.s offering localized e-mail services.
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Social networking? Well, there was GeoCities, sort of an early version of Facebook or Tumblr, but that site allowed fake names and didn’t have access to a lot of data. Where to start? There were multiple, competing search engines, including Lycos, Bigfoot, and AltaVista, few of which had much information worth getting one’s hands on. Think back to the late nineteen-nineties, and try to imagine the federal government trying to wiretap the Web. The remarkable consolidation of the communications and Web industries into a handful of firms has made spying much simpler and, therefore, more likely to happen. The structure of the information industry often goes unnoticed, but it has an enormous effect on the ease with which the government spies on citizens.
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These days, America has one dominant search engine, one dominant social-networking site, and four phone companies.