Explore "The Dead Past" by Isaac Asimov on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Readers of this story who are up on today's muckraking literature will be familiar with the name of Vance Packard. True, the dangers of electronic spying that Mr. Packard so ominously described In his best-seller The Naked Society do not even approach the terrifying possibilities that are unveiled in the tale you are about to read; but Packard's reports of the misuse of lie detectors, bugged rooms, secret television cameras, and other techniques of listening-and-looking-in on the behavior of Twentieth Century Man are only too suggestive of the final horror Professor Potterly here bestows on the Twenty-First Century world with his innocent-seeming portable chronoscope.
Maybe we should pass a Constitutional Amendment, or something, to bar the use of all mechanical and electronic machines for the invasion of privacy. However, the moral of "The Dead Past" seems to be that no such law-making will ever stop the human animal from exploiting one of the most typical-and dangerous-of all his characteristics, which is curiosity.