The Girl from B.E.L.L.

Everybody knows about bugged martini olives, the mike in the mattress, and all the other electronic snooping devices that prey upon the unwary and unwise. Last week the U.S. public learned that the most avid eavesdropper of all is not the CIA or SMERSH but good grey Mother Bell--the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. "During 1965," said Missouri's Democratic Senator Ed ward V. Long, "A.T. & T. monitored 36 million calls. No phones were exempt; Governors and other elected officials" were subject to phone tapping. "Even the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission," said Long, "didn't know the monitoring was going on until last month."

Listening Rooms. Testifying before Long's Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure, which has been studying organized invasions of privacy for the past two years, A.T. & T. Vice President Hubert L. Kertz admitted that the Bell (obviously an acronym for Beware Eager Little Listeners) system has condoned such eavesdropping for more than 60 years. But he had a different name for it, "service observing," a sort of quality-control system conducted in 2,200 locked "listening rooms" across the U.S. When Kertz insisted that the service ob servers did not actually listen to conversations, Long retorted, "Would you tell me that the operators are developed to the extent that they just hear the sound but are not conscious of the words or what is being said on that call?"

Long also got into an angry exchange with Edward Hanify, who as attorney for a New England T. & T. official denied that federal agents had been admitted to listening rooms in Boston. Exploded Long: "Mr. Attorney, you don't know what you are talking about. We have very definite information that certain federal agencies have had their employees in there and have used those rooms for monitoring purposes." Long did not identify the agencies, but in all likelihood he meant the FBI and the Internal Revenue Serv ice. In Nevada, for instance, a former casino owner is suing the FBI and the Central Telephone Co. for $4,500,000 on charges of illegally eavesdropping on his phone conversations.

Twelve-Second Snoop. By a curious coincidence. A.T. & T. changed some of its monitoring equipment last June 1, and the smaller General Telephone & Electronics Corp. followed suit shortly afterward--just about the time the Senate was launching its inquiry--in order to permit the Bellwether to catch only the first twelve seconds of a longdistance call. Nevertheless, Long still intends to propose what he describes as "comprehensive legislation to protect our citizens' privacy."

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