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“The world's most famous filing cabinet,” an artifact now housed in the Smithsonian Museum of American History, once belonged to the Los Angeles psychoanalyst Lewis Fielding. The cabinet shows obvious damage from having been pried open on September 3, 1971, by President Richard Nixon's “Plumbers” in their first foray into illegal spying on fellow citizens. The Plumbers sought information about any knowledge that Daniel Ellsberg, one of Fielding's patients, might have of Nixon's secret plans for expanding the war in Vietnam. The Plumbers may have wanted to “neutralize Ellsberg.” When this matter came to public attention during Ellsberg's trial for having released the classified “Pentagon Papers,” the media reported that the Plumbers had found nothing. On the contrary: they had discovered Ellsberg's file in the cabinet. They saw in that file a copy of a paper Ellsberg had written indicating that he had indeed seen relevant classified information (Edwards 2012).
Terrible as this break-in was, and despite the fact that it unleashed a chain of events leading to Watergate and ultimately to Nixon's resignation three years later, the incident now seems quaint to us because the means used to access Ellsberg's file was a mere crowbar, hardly the kind of high-tech tool with which such intrusions are carried out today. By 1991, tales in which analysts or their patients were intruded upon could still be the stuff of comedies like that year's What about Bob?, in which Bill Murray plays a highly dependent patient who stalks his new analyst (Richard Dreyfuss) on his New Hampshire vacation. In the transformed world we work in today, however, reality has taken a darker turn, not only in the lives of psychoanalysts and their patients, but in virtually everyone's life.
If the lilting title Stalker, Hacker, Voyeur, Spy reminds readers of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the reference is deliberate, as Helen Gediman readily acknowledges in her preface. She rejected her origina