But whether you called them spies or correspondents, the agencies relied on networks of locals sending written dispatches back to the central office. They sought information (often unreliably subjective) about a person’s credit-worthiness, judged not just in terms of his financial circumstances, but his personal character—Was he married? Did he have children? Who were his parents? What church did he attend? Sometimes this information wandered into the deeply embarrassing: In 1854, a man sued Tappan’s Mercantile Agency for libel after a credit report claimed that he had left his wife for a prostitute.

No wonder that words like “espionage” and “spying” so frequently found themselves in proximity to contemporary press accounts of the bureaus. “The whole proceeding bears upon its face the most diabolical jesuitism that has ever cursed the world,” wrote one merchant.

“Diabolical jesuitism” is not a phrase that springs immediately to mind when one thinks about credit reports. It’s especially surprising given that the bureaus were concerned with commercial credit—rather than encompassing all consumers, they only dealt with “men of trade.” Shouldn’t a credit check be business as usual?

Critics of the system were both fascinated and repulsed by the sheer scale of it all, with various commentaries referring to “an army of clerks,” “a little army of typewriter girls,” and thousands of spies scattered across the land, reporting back to a secretive New York office filled with thick leather-bound ledgers filed with tiny, “eye-blurring” script, marked up with cross-references that interlinked files across many different ledgers.

In a time before Borges, Kafka, or Orwell, newspapers struggled to find the right literary allusion to describe the mechanistic tableau unfolding before their eyes. (The Brooklyn Eagle went with Dickens’s Bleak House). Their horror wasn’t just from the outrage of being spied on or slandered. They were coming face to face with bureaucratic surveillance for the first time—one hundred years before the founding of the National Security Agency.

Tappan’s Mercantile Agency had over 300 correspondents in 1844, and grew to more than 10,000 by the 1870s. By the end of the 19th century, the agency would have created over 2,000 volumes of credit reports, gradually shifting from excruciatingly tiny calligraphy to typewritten pages.

R.G. Dun—eventual successor to Lewis Tappan—was one of the first business owners to embrace typewriters. The scope of the agencies exploded where new technologies let it grow. Today, the possibilities of bureaucratic surveillance—particularly in the hands of the government—appear limitless. James Bamford—who does have the good fortune of being able to allude to Borges—wrote in The Shadow Factory:

With its secret intercept rooms, its sprawling data farms, and its race for exaflop speeds [computer processing speeds at quintillions of operations per second], the NSA is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood.

The story of the credit-reporting agencies is “a pivotal though neglected chapter in the history of modern surveillance practice,” writes Josh Lauer, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, who has written about these entities in the forthcoming book The Good Consumer. For Lauer, the credit bureaus and government agencies have at least one obvious commonality—they are “omnivorous,” slurping up whatever they can find.