Source: TomDispatch
by Rebecca Gordon
“Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, ‘Mary,’ to update her on the plans. I hung up. But before I could make the call, my phone rang. ‘Hi, this is Mary,’ my friend said. ‘Mary! I was just about to call you.’ ‘But you did call me,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.’ It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems.” (06/24/25)