14 ms·

What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

420 points by rooster8 12y ago

wyager 12y ago
Let this serve as a demonstration that government agencies actually can be comically evil. A lot of people dismiss accusations against government agencies or fail to consider hypothetical legal abuse scenarios because "the government would never do that". Yes, the government would ever do that.
- mathattack 12y ago
  It's stronger than the government would do that. It's that the government did that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.
  - Scuds 12y ago
    In J. Edgar Hoover's mind Civil Rights Movement -> Destabilizing Effect on American Culture -> Probably a Communist Plot -> Civil Rights Movement is the Enemy
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      It wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover, it was everybody under him that cooperated with him on things like this.
    - pastProlog 12y ago
      Another thing to bear in mind was that a large part of the civil rights movement was blacks trying to exercise rights which they theoretically had a legal right to exercise in the 1950s and 1960s - vote in federal elections, travel in integrated interstate buses and use the bus terminal facilities during transfers, attend all-white public schools which the Brown decision had forbid in 1954 etc. So this was the government using its intelligence powers to secretly persecute people who were trying to non-violently exercise the rights they technically had under the law. Who know what political uses the information stored in the Utah Data Center will be used for in the future?
    - Estragon 12y ago
      The case against King was a little more specific than that, though still not a reasonable basis for suspicion: One of his close associates had historical ties to the US communist party. It was such a weak case that Hoover had to really push on LBJ to let him go after King so aggressively, and probably reflected cryptic racism as much as his fear of communism.
    - api 12y ago
      All governments to varying degrees seem to operate with a number of hidden imperatives, with one being "maintain the status quo." There will always be some within the government bureaucracy who see anything that deviates from the status quo of their host society as criminal or an enemy.
    - mathattack 12y ago
      I get that. And that, compared to the terrorism threat, communism was a real issue. It didn't look like we were winning, and there really were people on foreign government's payroll in the US. The problem is the ends didn't justify the means, because they were wrong. I do consider myself patriotic, but we have to fess up when we get things so wrong.
  - FilhoDaPuTa 12y ago
    So, after knowing this, how hard is to believe that it was indeed the FBI who killed him ?
  - scintill76 12y ago
    I was going to make an "academic"-type counter-argument that not even terrorism fears approach the anti-communist hysteria that probably drove this incident, thus it won't happen again... but then there's the NYPD mosque spying case. It's not the same active blackmailing situation. But I think we can say the fact that it happened at all in "our enlightened day and age" is sufficient evidence that, if there were a few person(s) to discredit in order to tear down movements that the government didn't like or feared, they wouldn't mind trampling civil liberties to get it done. Are there recent, well-documented cases of government blackmailing like this?
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      I would not doubt at all that the government is blackmailing extremist Muslims any chance they get. (And, interpret "extremist Muslims" as anybody Homeland Security thinks might be so.)
  - philwelch 12y ago
    King was "one of the world's great civil rights heroes" because he was a subversive figure. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that subversive figures end up encountering resistance from the Establishment. If you want an example of what the government would do and what the FBI did do, don't look at Martin Luther King. Look at Fred Hampton.
    - spopejoy 12y ago
      So much of the debate in discussion about this is whether police/FBI "abuse their power", are or are not "evil", if Hoover himself was obsessed, whether King was a saint or a hero or a fraud, was this or that legal, etc. I'm wondering more about what might be called the "collective subconscious" of the elite and powerful, which knows that black America doesn't forget slavery, Native Americans don't forget conquest, the part that remembers that a government's first and foremost enemy is its own people. The civil rights movement represented (re-presented) a direct threat to the establishment. It wasn't just the south, there were riots in every major city. Malcolm X was gunned down in NYC. The impoverished black populace, then and now, is a powder keg of rage and misery ready to explode, so targeting leaders was the tactic then. Now we have mass incarceration, with a significant percentage of the black population in jail, or denied full citizenship as felons. I guess I'm wondering just how much "law enforcement" effort is spent on this high-value problem, instead of on the myriad fantasy "crime-solver" cases that our lovely entertainment establishment narrates in cop show after cop show. For those who don't wish to Google, Fred Hampton was a Black Panther leader assassinated in his bed by Chicago police acting in concert with the FBI.
- deleted 12y ago
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opendais 12y ago
Tbh, this is what scares me about tech illiterate juries. Many of these cases hang on key pieces of evidence that are literally the FBI's word against the defendants.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  Good thing these things come up to make the FBI's word worth less, then! We need some sort of standardised trust metric....
  - opendais 12y ago
    I'd prefer a better educated populace that realizes the "technical evidence" being submitted in many cases is essentially witness testimony and not physical evidence [e.g. fingerprints on the murder weapon] which I think many people believe. Witness testimony is perfectly fine as long as it isn't implied to be anything greater than that.
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      Say the issue is call metadata. They showed that I called the murderer, who then murdered someone I had a grudge against. So this evidence doesn't prove that I did order a hit, but at least proves that I had the opportunity to have done so. The metadata is technical evidence, not witness testimony. But... Who wrote the software that collected the metadata? Any bugs in it? Any possibility that I did not, in fact, make that call? Where was the metadata stored? Who had access to it? Could anybody have altered it, perhaps even to cover their own tracks? Who had custody of the data after the records got pulled from the database? Any chance that they could have altered it? Maybe they knew that the prosecution's case was weak, and they wanted to make it look better? In this way, technical evidence does in fact depend on witness testimony.
      - opendais 12y ago
        Does that happen in every case for every piece of technical evidence?
samirmenon 12y ago
The New York Times actually broke the story. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...
- herbig 12y ago
  The first words of the EFF article are "The New York Times". This article, as the title suggests, goes more into the "dangers of unchecked surveillance" in a digital age.
- Mithrandir 12y ago
  Here's the letter: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/mag-16Lede-t_CA0-superJumbo.jpg http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...
  - Curmudgel 12y ago
    If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says: (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. which the EFF quoted as (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance).
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      I expect that was accidental, but I agree it should be fixed (either corrected in brackets, or the original with a [sic]).
- dang 12y ago
  Yes. We changed the url to that from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr... as the "original" source.
alukima 12y ago
I spent an obsessive night searching through documents via online 'reading rooms'. I don't have the links anymore but theres mounds of documentation showing intelligence agencies doing shady shit like this to try to break up civil rights groups. Fun look ups are 'blank panthers', 'san francisco', 'socialist', any black leader. San Francisco seems like a broad term but there's so much interesting stuff, they were watching school teachers in the 60s and 70s and trying to create distrust within communities that were too left leaning. http://vault.fbi.gov/search http://vault.fbi.gov/search http://www.foia.cia.gov/ http://www.foia.cia.gov/
- Estragon 12y ago
  The word to search for is COINTELPRO. Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI goes into some detail about it, and its notes probably provide pointers to the relevant documents.
- ep103 12y ago
  they still do this. Occupy was absolutely insane on this level, and we were small fish comparatively.
scintill76 12y ago
The unredacted version is really interesting historically, but I don't think it reveals much more about the lengths the FBI went to. I believe it was already well-known and believed that King was being sexually blackmailed specifically. The redacted portions all seem to deal with that exact nature of the blackmailing. The redaction reveals more about what the FBI wouldn't do: how at least one person was reluctant to release public documentation proving that's what the FBI did.
neue 12y ago
When was the letter written? What marked the significance of '34 days later'?
- Hovertruck 12y ago
  I think the NYT article implied that it was 34 days until the ceremony where he was awarded the Peace Prize.
mynameishere 12y ago
Eventually we'll know what's in his file: The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historical-archives-that-will-spill-new-secrets-966931/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historic... ...some people think he made extensive use of prostitutes, but I expect the FBI would have pulled an "Eliot Spitzer" on him had that been the case. Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  It's likely that people still alive are also recorded on the tapes. Whatever else it does, the court order also protects their privacy.
- deleted 12y ago
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- KerrickStaley 12y ago
  What Dr. King did or did not do isn't the point: the point is that the FBI abused its power (in a drastic fashion) in an attempt to suppress and damage King's political speech.
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  "... Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image..." It's interesting... but why would it matter ??? Isn't the issue that Americans endure INVASION of private time... not necessarily how Americans USE their private time ??? Serious question. Just wondering if there is some legal justification for invading privacy to find out ... say ... what a political enemy is doing ??? I don't think they're supposed to do that ... but I'm not a lawyer.
- 12423gsd 12y ago
  While he was not a communist, his plans for social justice were very threatening to the establishment If you read "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (which he wrote towards the end of his life), he basically says that the Civil Rights movement needs to shift from racial agenda to an agenda of helping the poor. However he never presents an actual plan other than some vague idea of a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign I'd go farther to argue that he's not a communist b/c he wasn't really thinking in those terms and he actively tried to avoid the label (that's why he took for ever to stand up against the war in Vietnam)
Mikeb85 12y ago
It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  That's actually the best hope for America, the expectation that we should do good, do the best we can.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - comice 12y ago
    I don't see how perpetuating the myth helps with achieving that.
    - GauntletWizard 12y ago
      Because "That's just the way things are done" is the best way to continue horrible practices. Oh, I'm just going to do this little bit of bribery/corruption/racism; it's not really as bad as practice X in the past. Understanding them is the best way to promote bad behaviors. People are naturally afraid of the unfamiliar. There's a limit; This is the same argument made by moral crusaders who're against sex education, and that ultimately causes harm. But it's the argument ignored by the D.A.R.E. program organizers, and that has a storied history of being shown (sometimes) to increase drug use[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education#Studies_on_effectiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Educatio...
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      It helps and it hurts. As GauntletWizard gets into, it helps when individuals asked (by individuals or circumstance) to be bad feel like they'd be doing something wrong and unusual, which people are less likely to do than things they just feel are wrong. It hurts when people who have already decided to do bad things exploit it.
daveloyall 12y ago
Is there any indication that the modern FBI et al would use a strategy like this? OMG STOP THE PRESSES I figured out the men's rights thing!
johnny99 12y ago
Snopes has a good explainer largely debunking one of the nastier pieces of misinformation circulating about MLK, which touches on FBI surveillance of him: http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp
codezero 12y ago
Wow the redacted parts read like modern day news article comment sections. I wonder, was it meant to look like it was sent from a crazy person, but to include specific facts to scare MLK, or is this aligned with the typical kinds of personality attacks done by people at the time?
josho 12y ago
This puts in context why privacy is so important. If for some reason you were to become a leader of a movement and the NSA had swept up every digital bit about you for the last 30 years then they could potentially have a goldmine of information to soil your name and put the movement into disarray.
dangayle 12y ago
How hard would it be to create a fake internet paper trail containing pornography, chat rooms, etc., as is mentioned in the article? It seems that would be relatively trivial for a sufficiently motivated state actor to perpetrate.
deleted 12y ago
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baxterross 12y ago
The government does more harm than good
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  For all the harm that government does, anarchy is almost always worse.
  - none_for_me_thx 12y ago
    Anarchy => no rulers not Anarchy => no rules
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      Rules come from somewhere. That somewhere is rulers. Therefore, no rulers => no rules. Therefore, (Anarchy => no rulers) => (Anarchy => no rules).
      - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
        Well, rules in anarchy have to come from consensus of the people. So the only rules, in practice, are those that the people are willing and able to enforce against those who wish to break them. History shows that, in anarchy situations, those who wish to break the rules are sometimes highly motivated and well armed. Thus anarchy at least means "no rules that apply to a warlord when he really wants them not to". Now, one could argue that that is essentially the situation with the US government now. But the well-armed warlords tend to show considerably less restraint than the US government does.
        PeterisP 12y ago
        There is no such thing consensus of the people in any communities of nontrivial size. In anarchy situations, whoever is capable of filling the power vacuum creates new rules - the "highly motivated and well armed" groups don't break the rules (since if they disagree, there's obviously not a consensus about those rules); they define the rules and others possibly break them.
comrade1 12y ago
This was in the 1960s. Imagine the projects being conceived now for targeting individuals and population subsets to change opinion, mood, etc. using things like social media, targeted communications, etc. The US then and now was totalitarian and authoritarian. Some of you, especially here on hn, may not fall into those mind-sets but it doesn't matter - you've lost - you're barely scraping by, working 60 to 80 hours a week and you have no time to change your environment. Meanwhile the political class is able to work full-time on perpetuating their power while taking away yours. You have no power, no rights, because they have been chiseled away the last 30 years by the authoritarians. I've said this before and I'm always downvoted but I don't care. Just leave. Go to Berlin, or London (not much better though), Switzerland, or anywhere else. Even if you go to someplace like the UK that isn't much better than the u.s. you will at least no longer be contributing to a government spending 10X to 100X of any other country on arguably evil pursuits. Take your wealth-creation skills to somewhere else where you won't be contributing to your our demise. I know that many of you will discount this one event as a one-off - MLK was certainly special. But it's only a one-off because it was the start of this sort of campaign against someone that can bring change.
- deleted 12y ago
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- smm2000 12y ago
  Chill out and pick different audience. Most people on HN are not just "scraping by" unless making >$100k first year after college is now called scraping by. I would say overall HN audience benefits much more from current political, economic and financial situation than suffer from it. It's probably not true for reddit so you can find more receptive audience there.
  - comrade1 12y ago
    By scraping by, I mean working 60+ hours per week for those wages. Here in Switzerland we work a normal workweek (45 hours) for an average wage 2x that plus a better quality of life. Germany and London pay much less though but experienced developers can get decent wages. Edit: also, when I lived in the u.s. and ma"de significantly more than 100K I still felt like I was scraping by. Taxes in the u.s., especially California, are high, expenses are high, and plus I had no time to spend my money anyway. If take a couple weeks off to travel every now and then but would have to at least answer emails while traveling. No more of that.
rglover 12y ago
Something that's always confused me about the world and people as a whole. Why are so many people hell bent on implementing some "moral standard" that everyone needs to follow? Honestly? There's this bizarre projection of the individual and his/her motivations onto every living being that fails to make any logical sense. Is there any psychological premise for why we feel the need to dictate the behavior of others such that they perfectly mirror how we behave (or in many cases, wish to)? There appears to be a tipping point where someone agrees with a certain set of values and as opposed to stopping at enforcing those values on themselves (reasonable), they go absolutely nuts trying to push it onto everyone else. A sort of: how dare you.
- nraynaud 12y ago
  MLK was a religious ministry, so his job was to spread some kind of moral standard on other people anyways. So 1) his moral standard where known 2) it was quite fair for his opponents to use those moral standards against him. (I'm not defending the letter or the FBI, I just think a minute detail of the story is consistent)
  - wwweston 12y ago
    It's fair enough to characterize King's work as part religious ministry, and I think it's also fair to consider what it means that King's walk didn't live up to all of the standards one would assume would come with his apparent Christianity. I'm not sure it is in fact fair "to use those moral standards against him", though, unless you're working with a conception of moral standards as a game in which the point is to cast your team into The Good Guys and the other team as The Bad Guys. And sure, some people play that exact game (the FBI is doing it here), but you can also approach moral standards as ideals which would make the world better if we could adhere to them. The latter conception still means that people who fail to keep standards can suffer natural consequences (as well as artificial ones of standing) if they don't adhere, but it's not much of an attack on the moral authority of the standard. There's also a question of a sort of standards severability. King is known for agitating for racial equality and social justice, not for being a crusader for the virtues of chastity and fidelity. If he'd been known to privately abuse and privilege based on apparent race, or inclined to acquire wealth at the expense of others, that'd seem be a bigger deal. Finally, a little bit of C.S. Lewis: "The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither." Again, none of this is to discount the value it might have to consider an MLK with weaknesses and some questionable behavior. Or, for that matter, the value of fidelity.
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- pXMzR2A 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party
- gizmo686 12y ago
  What would be the benefit of being a political party? If we want HN to become a political power (and I am not saying we do), then it seems like a more productive approach is to become a lobby like the EFF/ACLU/NRA/etc. Becoming a political party means that we would need to have a stance on every issue. Being a lobby means we can focus on the issues that we know about and care about.
  - rickdale 12y ago
    If we want HN to become a political power (and I am not saying we do), then it seems like a more productive approach is to become a lobby like the EFF/ACLU/NRA/etc. Isn't that the reason? We may need a lobby too.
- gohrt 12y ago
  A Political Party is full of likeminded people. (Or it loses elections; see: Democrats) HN is not a HiveMind. https://mayday.us/ https://mayday.us/
  - comrh 12y ago
    I think almost every group is a hivemind. And HN certainly shares characteristics of groupthink.
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      I don't think that almost every group is a hivemind. I don't think HN shares many characteristics of groupthink. Even if I'm wrong, that still means I'm not part of the same hivemind/groupthink as you are. And yet here we both are, on HN.
diminoten 12y ago
I find myself afraid to criticize this submission, because I don't feel an honest discourse about this submission can take place on Hacker News. That should sadden you, as it saddens me.
declan 12y ago
Much of this was known before, including the FBI's anonymous letter attempting to provoke a suicide. As others said elsewhere in this thread, documents came out during the Church Committee. I wrote this 15 years ago when I worked at Time: The FBI's campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King began in December 1963, soon after the famous civil rights March on Washington. It started with an extensive -- and illegal -- electronic surveillance of King that probed into every corner of his personal life. Two weeks after the march, the same week King appeared on the cover of Time magazine as "Man of the Year," FBI agents inserted a microphone in King's bedroom. ("They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with that one," FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said of the Time cover story.) Hoover wiretapped King's phone and fed the information to the Defense Department and to friendly newspapermen. When King travelled to Europe to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover tried to derail meetings between King and foreign officials, including the Pope. Hoover even sent King an anonymous letter, using information gathered through illegal surveillance, to encourage the depressed civil rights leader to commit suicide. "The actions taken against Dr. King are indefensible. They represent a sad episode in the dark history of covert actions directed against law-abiding citizens by a law enforcement agency," a Senate committee concluded in 1976. […] History reveals that time and again, the FBI, the military and other law enforcement organizations have ignored the law and spied on Americans illegally, without court authorization. Government agencies have subjected hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans to unjust surveillance, illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches. Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests were spied on. The FBI used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections. http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Shame we never had any Church committee after the Snowden revelations. Where are all the NSA "reforms" now? They even have the nerve to say that the "pendulum has swung too far" in favor of privacy, when absolutely nothing has changed in the form of law since then.
jack-r-abbit 12y ago
If this hadn't been labeled "suicide letter" I never would have read into it that the writer wanted King to kill himself. "You know what to do" is actually pretty vague. Do what? Come clean about his affairs? Leave the country? Quit being a pain in the ass for the government? Quit working on civil rights?
sopooneo 12y ago
Do we have a guess as to why they wanted him dead? Was it that those in power believed the rise of African American citizens would disrupt the power structure and their position in it? Or was it purely racist, with the powerful just believing it was wrong for black people to have equal rights?
rooster8 12y ago
The URL was changed to the NY Times article that originally broke the story, but this post originally linked to an EFF interpretation of the article: FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...
pitt1980 12y ago
maybe we should compare some of these misdeeds to the misdeeds of the various communist governments that inspired those misdeeds
jqm 12y ago
To me, the most ironic part of the whole situation is Hoover's private behavior... That aside, there is very little doubt in my mind Hoover was a bad man. The sad part is, many people eventually are bad given the chance and they never even know it. This is why impartial rules and transparency are important. This may not be a common sentiment, but I look forward to the day when we are governed by machines rather than monkeys. I mean... the constitution, the rules of state and religion, they are algorithms no? Designed to remove as much as possible the corruptible human element from the equation? So why not take this concept a level further? That's my thinking. Eventually there will always be another Hoover. But the next one might have better tools. But I think the human race can build a better system based on principals of efficiency, impartiality and beneficence. And maybe after a bit more waste, abuse and needless suffering caused by greed (that is the bottom line with the people who run the Hoovers of the world no?) it will.

420 points by rooster8 12y ago

Let this serve as a demonstration that government agencies actually can be comically evil. A lot of people dismiss accusations against government agencies or fail to consider hypothetical legal abuse scenarios because "the government would never do that". Yes, the government would ever do that.

mathattack 12y ago
It's stronger than the government would do that. It's that the government did that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.
- Scuds 12y ago
  In J. Edgar Hoover's mind Civil Rights Movement -> Destabilizing Effect on American Culture -> Probably a Communist Plot -> Civil Rights Movement is the Enemy
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    It wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover, it was everybody under him that cooperated with him on things like this.
  - pastProlog 12y ago
    Another thing to bear in mind was that a large part of the civil rights movement was blacks trying to exercise rights which they theoretically had a legal right to exercise in the 1950s and 1960s - vote in federal elections, travel in integrated interstate buses and use the bus terminal facilities during transfers, attend all-white public schools which the Brown decision had forbid in 1954 etc. So this was the government using its intelligence powers to secretly persecute people who were trying to non-violently exercise the rights they technically had under the law. Who know what political uses the information stored in the Utah Data Center will be used for in the future?
  - Estragon 12y ago
    The case against King was a little more specific than that, though still not a reasonable basis for suspicion: One of his close associates had historical ties to the US communist party. It was such a weak case that Hoover had to really push on LBJ to let him go after King so aggressively, and probably reflected cryptic racism as much as his fear of communism.
  - api 12y ago
    All governments to varying degrees seem to operate with a number of hidden imperatives, with one being "maintain the status quo." There will always be some within the government bureaucracy who see anything that deviates from the status quo of their host society as criminal or an enemy.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    I get that. And that, compared to the terrorism threat, communism was a real issue. It didn't look like we were winning, and there really were people on foreign government's payroll in the US. The problem is the ends didn't justify the means, because they were wrong. I do consider myself patriotic, but we have to fess up when we get things so wrong.
- FilhoDaPuTa 12y ago
  So, after knowing this, how hard is to believe that it was indeed the FBI who killed him ?
- scintill76 12y ago
  I was going to make an "academic"-type counter-argument that not even terrorism fears approach the anti-communist hysteria that probably drove this incident, thus it won't happen again... but then there's the NYPD mosque spying case. It's not the same active blackmailing situation. But I think we can say the fact that it happened at all in "our enlightened day and age" is sufficient evidence that, if there were a few person(s) to discredit in order to tear down movements that the government didn't like or feared, they wouldn't mind trampling civil liberties to get it done. Are there recent, well-documented cases of government blackmailing like this?
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    I would not doubt at all that the government is blackmailing extremist Muslims any chance they get. (And, interpret "extremist Muslims" as anybody Homeland Security thinks might be so.)
- philwelch 12y ago
  King was "one of the world's great civil rights heroes" because he was a subversive figure. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that subversive figures end up encountering resistance from the Establishment. If you want an example of what the government would do and what the FBI did do, don't look at Martin Luther King. Look at Fred Hampton.
  - spopejoy 12y ago
    So much of the debate in discussion about this is whether police/FBI "abuse their power", are or are not "evil", if Hoover himself was obsessed, whether King was a saint or a hero or a fraud, was this or that legal, etc. I'm wondering more about what might be called the "collective subconscious" of the elite and powerful, which knows that black America doesn't forget slavery, Native Americans don't forget conquest, the part that remembers that a government's first and foremost enemy is its own people. The civil rights movement represented (re-presented) a direct threat to the establishment. It wasn't just the south, there were riots in every major city. Malcolm X was gunned down in NYC. The impoverished black populace, then and now, is a powder keg of rage and misery ready to explode, so targeting leaders was the tactic then. Now we have mass incarceration, with a significant percentage of the black population in jail, or denied full citizenship as felons. I guess I'm wondering just how much "law enforcement" effort is spent on this high-value problem, instead of on the myriad fantasy "crime-solver" cases that our lovely entertainment establishment narrates in cop show after cop show. For those who don't wish to Google, Fred Hampton was a Black Panther leader assassinated in his bed by Chicago police acting in concert with the FBI.
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opendais 12y ago

Tbh, this is what scares me about tech illiterate juries. Many of these cases hang on key pieces of evidence that are literally the FBI's word against the defendants.

spiritplumber 12y ago
Good thing these things come up to make the FBI's word worth less, then! We need some sort of standardised trust metric....
- opendais 12y ago
  I'd prefer a better educated populace that realizes the "technical evidence" being submitted in many cases is essentially witness testimony and not physical evidence [e.g. fingerprints on the murder weapon] which I think many people believe. Witness testimony is perfectly fine as long as it isn't implied to be anything greater than that.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    Say the issue is call metadata. They showed that I called the murderer, who then murdered someone I had a grudge against. So this evidence doesn't prove that I did order a hit, but at least proves that I had the opportunity to have done so. The metadata is technical evidence, not witness testimony. But... Who wrote the software that collected the metadata? Any bugs in it? Any possibility that I did not, in fact, make that call? Where was the metadata stored? Who had access to it? Could anybody have altered it, perhaps even to cover their own tracks? Who had custody of the data after the records got pulled from the database? Any chance that they could have altered it? Maybe they knew that the prosecution's case was weak, and they wanted to make it look better? In this way, technical evidence does in fact depend on witness testimony.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Does that happen in every case for every piece of technical evidence?

samirmenon 12y ago

The New York Times actually broke the story. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...

herbig 12y ago
The first words of the EFF article are "The New York Times". This article, as the title suggests, goes more into the "dangers of unchecked surveillance" in a digital age.
Mithrandir 12y ago
Here's the letter: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/mag-16Lede-t_CA0-superJumbo.jpg http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...
- Curmudgel 12y ago
  If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says: (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. which the EFF quoted as (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance).
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    I expect that was accidental, but I agree it should be fixed (either corrected in brackets, or the original with a [sic]).
dang 12y ago
Yes. We changed the url to that from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr... as the "original" source.

alukima 12y ago

I spent an obsessive night searching through documents via online 'reading rooms'. I don't have the links anymore but theres mounds of documentation showing intelligence agencies doing shady shit like this to try to break up civil rights groups. Fun look ups are 'blank panthers', 'san francisco', 'socialist', any black leader. San Francisco seems like a broad term but there's so much interesting stuff, they were watching school teachers in the 60s and 70s and trying to create distrust within communities that were too left leaning. http://vault.fbi.gov/search http://vault.fbi.gov/search http://www.foia.cia.gov/ http://www.foia.cia.gov/

Estragon 12y ago
The word to search for is COINTELPRO. Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI goes into some detail about it, and its notes probably provide pointers to the relevant documents.
ep103 12y ago
they still do this. Occupy was absolutely insane on this level, and we were small fish comparatively.

scintill76 12y ago

The unredacted version is really interesting historically, but I don't think it reveals much more about the lengths the FBI went to. I believe it was already well-known and believed that King was being sexually blackmailed specifically. The redacted portions all seem to deal with that exact nature of the blackmailing. The redaction reveals more about what the FBI wouldn't do: how at least one person was reluctant to release public documentation proving that's what the FBI did.

neue 12y ago

When was the letter written? What marked the significance of '34 days later'?

Hovertruck 12y ago
I think the NYT article implied that it was 34 days until the ceremony where he was awarded the Peace Prize.

mynameishere 12y ago

Eventually we'll know what's in his file: The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historical-archives-that-will-spill-new-secrets-966931/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historic... ...some people think he made extensive use of prostitutes, but I expect the FBI would have pulled an "Eliot Spitzer" on him had that been the case. Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image.

maxerickson 12y ago
It's likely that people still alive are also recorded on the tapes. Whatever else it does, the court order also protects their privacy.
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KerrickStaley 12y ago
What Dr. King did or did not do isn't the point: the point is that the FBI abused its power (in a drastic fashion) in an attempt to suppress and damage King's political speech.
bilbo0s 12y ago
"... Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image..." It's interesting... but why would it matter ??? Isn't the issue that Americans endure INVASION of private time... not necessarily how Americans USE their private time ??? Serious question. Just wondering if there is some legal justification for invading privacy to find out ... say ... what a political enemy is doing ??? I don't think they're supposed to do that ... but I'm not a lawyer.
12423gsd 12y ago
While he was not a communist, his plans for social justice were very threatening to the establishment If you read "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (which he wrote towards the end of his life), he basically says that the Civil Rights movement needs to shift from racial agenda to an agenda of helping the poor. However he never presents an actual plan other than some vague idea of a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign I'd go farther to argue that he's not a communist b/c he wasn't really thinking in those terms and he actively tried to avoid the label (that's why he took for ever to stand up against the war in Vietnam)

Mikeb85 12y ago

It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
That's actually the best hope for America, the expectation that we should do good, do the best we can.
- deleted 12y ago
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- comice 12y ago
  I don't see how perpetuating the myth helps with achieving that.
  - GauntletWizard 12y ago
    Because "That's just the way things are done" is the best way to continue horrible practices. Oh, I'm just going to do this little bit of bribery/corruption/racism; it's not really as bad as practice X in the past. Understanding them is the best way to promote bad behaviors. People are naturally afraid of the unfamiliar. There's a limit; This is the same argument made by moral crusaders who're against sex education, and that ultimately causes harm. But it's the argument ignored by the D.A.R.E. program organizers, and that has a storied history of being shown (sometimes) to increase drug use[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education#Studies_on_effectiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Educatio...
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    It helps and it hurts. As GauntletWizard gets into, it helps when individuals asked (by individuals or circumstance) to be bad feel like they'd be doing something wrong and unusual, which people are less likely to do than things they just feel are wrong. It hurts when people who have already decided to do bad things exploit it.

daveloyall 12y ago

Is there any indication that the modern FBI et al would use a strategy like this? OMG STOP THE PRESSES I figured out the men's rights thing!

johnny99 12y ago

Snopes has a good explainer largely debunking one of the nastier pieces of misinformation circulating about MLK, which touches on FBI surveillance of him: http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp

codezero 12y ago

Wow the redacted parts read like modern day news article comment sections. I wonder, was it meant to look like it was sent from a crazy person, but to include specific facts to scare MLK, or is this aligned with the typical kinds of personality attacks done by people at the time?

josho 12y ago

This puts in context why privacy is so important. If for some reason you were to become a leader of a movement and the NSA had swept up every digital bit about you for the last 30 years then they could potentially have a goldmine of information to soil your name and put the movement into disarray.

dangayle 12y ago

How hard would it be to create a fake internet paper trail containing pornography, chat rooms, etc., as is mentioned in the article? It seems that would be relatively trivial for a sufficiently motivated state actor to perpetrate.

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baxterross 12y ago

The government does more harm than good

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
For all the harm that government does, anarchy is almost always worse.
- none_for_me_thx 12y ago
  Anarchy => no rulers not Anarchy => no rules
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    Rules come from somewhere. That somewhere is rulers. Therefore, no rulers => no rules. Therefore, (Anarchy => no rulers) => (Anarchy => no rules).
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      Well, rules in anarchy have to come from consensus of the people. So the only rules, in practice, are those that the people are willing and able to enforce against those who wish to break them. History shows that, in anarchy situations, those who wish to break the rules are sometimes highly motivated and well armed. Thus anarchy at least means "no rules that apply to a warlord when he really wants them not to". Now, one could argue that that is essentially the situation with the US government now. But the well-armed warlords tend to show considerably less restraint than the US government does.
      - PeterisP 12y ago
        There is no such thing consensus of the people in any communities of nontrivial size. In anarchy situations, whoever is capable of filling the power vacuum creates new rules - the "highly motivated and well armed" groups don't break the rules (since if they disagree, there's obviously not a consensus about those rules); they define the rules and others possibly break them.

comrade1 12y ago

This was in the 1960s. Imagine the projects being conceived now for targeting individuals and population subsets to change opinion, mood, etc. using things like social media, targeted communications, etc. The US then and now was totalitarian and authoritarian. Some of you, especially here on hn, may not fall into those mind-sets but it doesn't matter - you've lost - you're barely scraping by, working 60 to 80 hours a week and you have no time to change your environment. Meanwhile the political class is able to work full-time on perpetuating their power while taking away yours. You have no power, no rights, because they have been chiseled away the last 30 years by the authoritarians. I've said this before and I'm always downvoted but I don't care. Just leave. Go to Berlin, or London (not much better though), Switzerland, or anywhere else. Even if you go to someplace like the UK that isn't much better than the u.s. you will at least no longer be contributing to a government spending 10X to 100X of any other country on arguably evil pursuits. Take your wealth-creation skills to somewhere else where you won't be contributing to your our demise. I know that many of you will discount this one event as a one-off - MLK was certainly special. But it's only a one-off because it was the start of this sort of campaign against someone that can bring change.

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smm2000 12y ago
Chill out and pick different audience. Most people on HN are not just "scraping by" unless making >$100k first year after college is now called scraping by. I would say overall HN audience benefits much more from current political, economic and financial situation than suffer from it. It's probably not true for reddit so you can find more receptive audience there.
- comrade1 12y ago
  By scraping by, I mean working 60+ hours per week for those wages. Here in Switzerland we work a normal workweek (45 hours) for an average wage 2x that plus a better quality of life. Germany and London pay much less though but experienced developers can get decent wages. Edit: also, when I lived in the u.s. and ma"de significantly more than 100K I still felt like I was scraping by. Taxes in the u.s., especially California, are high, expenses are high, and plus I had no time to spend my money anyway. If take a couple weeks off to travel every now and then but would have to at least answer emails while traveling. No more of that.

rglover 12y ago

Something that's always confused me about the world and people as a whole. Why are so many people hell bent on implementing some "moral standard" that everyone needs to follow? Honestly? There's this bizarre projection of the individual and his/her motivations onto every living being that fails to make any logical sense. Is there any psychological premise for why we feel the need to dictate the behavior of others such that they perfectly mirror how we behave (or in many cases, wish to)? There appears to be a tipping point where someone agrees with a certain set of values and as opposed to stopping at enforcing those values on themselves (reasonable), they go absolutely nuts trying to push it onto everyone else. A sort of: how dare you.

nraynaud 12y ago
MLK was a religious ministry, so his job was to spread some kind of moral standard on other people anyways. So 1) his moral standard where known 2) it was quite fair for his opponents to use those moral standards against him. (I'm not defending the letter or the FBI, I just think a minute detail of the story is consistent)
- wwweston 12y ago
  It's fair enough to characterize King's work as part religious ministry, and I think it's also fair to consider what it means that King's walk didn't live up to all of the standards one would assume would come with his apparent Christianity. I'm not sure it is in fact fair "to use those moral standards against him", though, unless you're working with a conception of moral standards as a game in which the point is to cast your team into The Good Guys and the other team as The Bad Guys. And sure, some people play that exact game (the FBI is doing it here), but you can also approach moral standards as ideals which would make the world better if we could adhere to them. The latter conception still means that people who fail to keep standards can suffer natural consequences (as well as artificial ones of standing) if they don't adhere, but it's not much of an attack on the moral authority of the standard. There's also a question of a sort of standards severability. King is known for agitating for racial equality and social justice, not for being a crusader for the virtues of chastity and fidelity. If he'd been known to privately abuse and privilege based on apparent race, or inclined to acquire wealth at the expense of others, that'd seem be a bigger deal. Finally, a little bit of C.S. Lewis: "The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither." Again, none of this is to discount the value it might have to consider an MLK with weaknesses and some questionable behavior. Or, for that matter, the value of fidelity.

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pXMzR2A 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party
gizmo686 12y ago
What would be the benefit of being a political party? If we want HN to become a political power (and I am not saying we do), then it seems like a more productive approach is to become a lobby like the EFF/ACLU/NRA/etc. Becoming a political party means that we would need to have a stance on every issue. Being a lobby means we can focus on the issues that we know about and care about.
- rickdale 12y ago
  If we want HN to become a political power (and I am not saying we do), then it seems like a more productive approach is to become a lobby like the EFF/ACLU/NRA/etc. Isn't that the reason? We may need a lobby too.
gohrt 12y ago
A Political Party is full of likeminded people. (Or it loses elections; see: Democrats) HN is not a HiveMind. https://mayday.us/ https://mayday.us/
- comrh 12y ago
  I think almost every group is a hivemind. And HN certainly shares characteristics of groupthink.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    I don't think that almost every group is a hivemind. I don't think HN shares many characteristics of groupthink. Even if I'm wrong, that still means I'm not part of the same hivemind/groupthink as you are. And yet here we both are, on HN.

diminoten 12y ago

I find myself afraid to criticize this submission, because I don't feel an honest discourse about this submission can take place on Hacker News. That should sadden you, as it saddens me.

declan 12y ago

Much of this was known before, including the FBI's anonymous letter attempting to provoke a suicide. As others said elsewhere in this thread, documents came out during the Church Committee. I wrote this 15 years ago when I worked at Time: The FBI's campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King began in December 1963, soon after the famous civil rights March on Washington. It started with an extensive -- and illegal -- electronic surveillance of King that probed into every corner of his personal life. Two weeks after the march, the same week King appeared on the cover of Time magazine as "Man of the Year," FBI agents inserted a microphone in King's bedroom. ("They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with that one," FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said of the Time cover story.) Hoover wiretapped King's phone and fed the information to the Defense Department and to friendly newspapermen. When King travelled to Europe to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover tried to derail meetings between King and foreign officials, including the Pope. Hoover even sent King an anonymous letter, using information gathered through illegal surveillance, to encourage the depressed civil rights leader to commit suicide. "The actions taken against Dr. King are indefensible. They represent a sad episode in the dark history of covert actions directed against law-abiding citizens by a law enforcement agency," a Senate committee concluded in 1976. […] History reveals that time and again, the FBI, the military and other law enforcement organizations have ignored the law and spied on Americans illegally, without court authorization. Government agencies have subjected hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans to unjust surveillance, illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches. Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests were spied on. The FBI used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections. http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html

higherpurpose 12y ago
Shame we never had any Church committee after the Snowden revelations. Where are all the NSA "reforms" now? They even have the nerve to say that the "pendulum has swung too far" in favor of privacy, when absolutely nothing has changed in the form of law since then.

jack-r-abbit 12y ago

If this hadn't been labeled "suicide letter" I never would have read into it that the writer wanted King to kill himself. "You know what to do" is actually pretty vague. Do what? Come clean about his affairs? Leave the country? Quit being a pain in the ass for the government? Quit working on civil rights?

sopooneo 12y ago

Do we have a guess as to why they wanted him dead? Was it that those in power believed the rise of African American citizens would disrupt the power structure and their position in it? Or was it purely racist, with the powerful just believing it was wrong for black people to have equal rights?

rooster8 12y ago

The URL was changed to the NY Times article that originally broke the story, but this post originally linked to an EFF interpretation of the article: FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

pitt1980 12y ago

maybe we should compare some of these misdeeds to the misdeeds of the various communist governments that inspired those misdeeds

jqm 12y ago

To me, the most ironic part of the whole situation is Hoover's private behavior... That aside, there is very little doubt in my mind Hoover was a bad man. The sad part is, many people eventually are bad given the chance and they never even know it. This is why impartial rules and transparency are important. This may not be a common sentiment, but I look forward to the day when we are governed by machines rather than monkeys. I mean... the constitution, the rules of state and religion, they are algorithms no? Designed to remove as much as possible the corruptible human element from the equation? So why not take this concept a level further? That's my thinking. Eventually there will always be another Hoover. But the next one might have better tools. But I think the human race can build a better system based on principals of efficiency, impartiality and beneficence. And maybe after a bit more waste, abuse and needless suffering caused by greed (that is the bottom line with the people who run the Hoovers of the world no?) it will.