On the Wire: Electronic Surveillance and the War on Drugs: Lecture with Dr. Brian Hochman

“On the Wire: Electronic Surveillance and the War on Drugs” explored how the wiretap emerged as a privileged law enforcement tool in the U.S. war on drugs. Ranging from the earliest narcotics wiretaps in the 1970s to the passage of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act–a law that required the U.S. telecom industry to build surveillance friendly networks–Dr. Hochman traced the influence of the drug war’s racial politics on the normalization of electronic surveillance in complex criminal investigations. This lecture was part of the “Soundtracks: New Global Perspectives on Sound Studies” lecture series.

Brian Hochman is Hubert J. Cloke Director of American Studies and Professor of American Studies and English at Georgetown University. He is the author of two books. The most recent, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2022), traces the history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The research for this project received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Program and the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center, and it was named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s 20 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022. His first book, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize in 2015. His academic writings have appeared in American Literature, African American Review, Callaloo, Notes and Queries, Post45: Peer Reviewed, Resilience, and The Multilingual Screen: New Perspectives on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (Bloomsbury, 2016). His research on electronic surveillance has been featured in IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Wired among other venues.