Stephen J. Cannell's series The Rockford Files bears a significant resemblance to the previous decade's Mannix, though without the systematic fetishization of high technology. Like Mannix and numerous other TV detectives, Rockford mostly works alone to solve crimes and mysteries and is frequently outmatched by his opponents in terms of strength, weaponry, governmental and institutional power, financial resources and social class, managing to succeed in his investigations through a combination of instinct, intelligence, ethics, homespun advice from his father and support from a detective on the police force. For Cannell, the success of The Rockford Files, which ran on NBC for six seasons, gave rise to several structurally similar TV series, including Baretta, The A-Team, Tenspeed and Brownshoe, Hunter and Riptide, all created or cocreated by Cannell. Among these, only Riptide (1983-86) directly engages the computational culture of the early PC era.

In a prescient episode from season 4 of The Rockford Files titled, "The House on Willis Avenue" (1978), private detective Jim Rockford (James Garner) uncovers a government surveillance operation that is collecting intelligence on US citizens by means of data centers located in suburban homes. Each data center is protected by remote surveillance systems and continuously monitored by government agents. Rockford discovers one of these data centers while investigating the death of a fellow detective, which makes him a target for those trying to keep the surveillance operations secret. The episode does not offer much detail on the nature of the surveillance, nor why these unmanned centers would be located in suburban houses, but the efficiency and ruthlessness of the government agents operating them is unmistakably fascistic and contrary to American Constitutional rights. Rockford narrowly escapes being murdered in an attempt to secure his silence and, after confronting the owner of the private information company, goes on to expose a related conspiracy that vindicates his former colleague, prompting an investigation that promises to shut down the unlawful surveillance operation.

Most striking, at the conclusion of the episode, a text screen appears over silence with a didactic warning from the "U.S. Privacy Protection Commission," stating that such operations are being carried out in the real world, in violation of citizens' rights. This explicitly political gesture, which breaks out of the diegetic world of the show to comment on the world inhabited by viewers, is a rare occurrence for both The Rockford Files and network television generally. With this blunt text warning, The Rockford Files poses a critique of the looming potential for data surveillance that is beyond the critical capacity of a fictional drama. It is also presumably an artifact of the show's post-Watergate historical context when the data-gathering capacity of computer systems would not yet have attained wide public awareness. Indeed, the narrative closure of the episode included a disclaimer by a government official, who blamed the creation of the surveillance network on the overzealousness of individuals, rather than government policy: "it appears that [the men who were arrested] were attempting to set up a secret system of computers which would carry the personal records of some 200 million Americans." The episode concludes with a news broadcaster who summarizes the events: "It gives one pause. It's one thing for our government to have us categorized and computerized, but why does a company install a secret, underground computer center right in the middle of one of the world's largest cities? Why indeed?"

In the wake of the Watergate scandal and revelations about Nixon Administration abuses of privacy, the US Privacy Protection Study Commission (PPSC) was created by Congress as part of the Privacy Act of 1974. This was more or less concurrent with the creation of the Church Commission, aka the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church from 1975 to 1976. While the Church Commission focused on a broad range of intelligence-gathering activities of the CIA, FBI and NSA, the PPSC focused on a narrower range of concerns specifically related to the potential for electronic surveillance made possible by the computerization of records stored in government and private databases.

The PPSC was chaired by University of Illinois political economist David F. Linowes until it was decommissioned in 1977. The creation of this temporary body to study and make recommendations regarding privacy constituted a compromise that fell short of creating a permanent governmental body to monitor privacy issues during a time of rapidly proliferating computer technologies and networks. The commission was specifically authorized to "make a study of the data banks, automatic data processing programs, and information systems of governmental, regional and private organizations, in order to determine the standards and procedures in force for the protection of personal information." The Privacy Protection Study Commission delivered a series of recommendations to Congress and President Carter, resulting in the passage of a handful of laws adopting the recommendations of the commission and dissemination of guidelines that the commission hoped would be implemented voluntarily by corporations and other private entities. The Privacy Act was subsequently modified in 1988 to address additional shifts in the interoperability of databases across multiple systems and government agencies.

The rejectionist, cyberlibertarian critique exemplified by Mannix offers a pointed but unsophisticated response to the encroachments of technology on individual privacy compared with the explicit, metaleptic paranoia of The Rockford Files. However, the isolated text critique offered at the end of "The House on Willis Avenue" falls short of the kind of sustained critique needed to genuinely raise awareness and mobilize public action on behalf of privacy issues.

Comment on this page