Here's Looking at You

Soon after the monumental flap over the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon (TIME, April 5), network news crews began prowling side streets and ducking behind bushes. They were not trying to lie low under the barrage of criticism from Pentagon brass and their congressional supporters. Rather they were at work filming another documentary titled Under Surveillance. They managed to photograph plainclothesmen photographing antiwar demonstrators, shadowed FBI agents shadowing a young radical, interviewed 50 people about how they monitor or are monitored by others.

The resulting program, aired last week, covered rather more familiar ground with rather more restraint than Pentagon.

At one point the camera focused on the shoes of an unidentified mailman as he told of keeping daily logs for the police on mail received by certain residents on his route. Later it zoomed in on the Adam's apple of a Pennsylvania Bell executive as he said, "Under no circumstances are wiretaps performed on the premises of the telephone company," then swallowed hard and conceded that taps were often made on outlying company property like telephone poles.

Philadelphia's former police commissioner, now mayor-elect, Frank Rizzo admitted in an interview that he had always kept his files in "good shape" on the "jokers" who "infiltrate" and manipulate protest groups. Rizzo argued that tough surveillance tools are necessary in a democracy to protect well-meaning people who might otherwise be "led to slaughter like sheep--you know, just like any mob."

The footage compiled by Producers Burton Benjamin and Robert Chandler and Correspondent David Schoumacher added up to an implicit indictment of governmental agencies in general for their spying on citizens. But in accordance with strict new guidelines laid down by the network after the Pentagon episode, the producers took pains to avoid misleading editing.

They also were careful not to make specific scapegoats of the police or of such figures as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or Attorney General John Mitchell.

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