The Last Archive, A History of Truth

Are you gonna answer that?

I don't want to tell you what to do, but you're listening to this on your phone and your phone is ringing.

Fine, I'll answer it.

Oh, it's a character from a movie made in the 1950s.

Wiretapper.

Did you develop equipment to listen in on a telephone?

That is, record a conversation without the owner knowing anything about it.

Wiretapper tells the story of Big Jim Voss, an electronic guy in Los Angeles who gets work bugging phones and slowly but surely gets sucked into a criminal underworld and winds up becoming a pretty big deal.

There's the scene that shows the moment he becomes a wiretapper.

You can tell he's hanging out with the mob because they're sitting around smoking, listening to jazz.

Wiretapping is illegal, Mr. Remstie. Just answer the question.

I could put the equipment together.

The movie hit theaters early in 1955.

That same year, a best-selling book called Wiretapp was in stores.

Columbia Pictures was said to be working on a movie called The Wiretappers.

This stuff was all over the place.

It was still a new thing for some people to have a phone in their house and people were a little itchy about it.

The newspaper has kept writing stories about the dangers of wiretapping. Someone was listening in.

Wiretapper of the movie was tapping straight into that fear.

The ads for the film read, if you're on the phone, you're not safe.

Even the police aren't allowed to tap private wires.

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