Checks and Balances: Privacy, Payments, and the Public Interest in the Development of 1970s US Electronic Funds Transfer Systems

“Stop! Stop! Stop! The electronic funds transfer system is a threat to our personal freedom as American citizens.” This letter from an Indiana resident was one of over 6,000 to arrive at the offices of the National Commission on Electronic Funds Transfer in the Fall of 1976. Coupled with petitions bearing the signatures of over 13,000 citizens, the Commission concluded that “for such an obscure story on such an abstract subject the amount of mail that was generated and the strength of sentiments they expressed is astonishing.” As it became a locus for the expression of public concerns over the automation of labor, loss of control over one’s papers and effects, and increased electronic collection of personal data, the Commission was confronted with a realization taken straight out of an STS textbook—that seemingly technical matters are always-already political for some social groups. But, in first configuring their subject as a technical matter first, which then had repercussions for pre-designated stakeholders, the Commission glossed over the fact that the introduction of “the computer” into everyday banking reconfigured the modes through which individuals came to see themselves as data-subjects throughout the 1970s. Against the backdrop of Watergate and growing distrust of centralized institutions, the notion that a commission concerned with setting industry standards and material infrastructure could reshape the nature of American citizenship suddenly had resonance. Drawing on archival materials such as public hearings, workshop transcripts, and letters and petitions from the public and lobbyists, I argue that anxieties about the specter of automation, loss of privacy to the databank, and the “cashless” or “checkless” society were increasingly framed as technical issues of data security, encryption standards, and the regulation of inter-agency information sequestration, resulting in a new vision of the “public interest,” which the Commission was tasked with identifying.