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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

by 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.
- pmoriarty 12y ago
  What's changed is that a lot of this surveillance is perfectly legal now. The surveillance state has written itself a blank check.
- declan 12y ago
  > Where are all the NSA "reforms" now? Yep. It's been ~18 months since we first heard of Edward Snowden, and there have been no significant policy (as in, presidential executive order) or legal changes to NSA surveillance authority. I don't know why there's no modern-day Church committee, but here are a few hypotheses: 1. Sen. Church was running the investigation circa 1975, a few years after Watergate was exposed and a year after Nixon resigned. I suspect there was much more public concern about executive abuses than there are today, and the GOP's willingness to defend the Nixon administration was limited post-Waterage (compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D in the White House). 2. Much of FedGov's surveillance abuses pre-Church were clearly illegal and criminal. The lesson intelligence agencies learned is that, no matter how dodgy the behavior, as long as there's an AG opinion theoretically blessing it, you won't be prosecuted. So the surveillance abuses today may violate the 4A and our sense of proportionality, but they aren't clearly indictable offenses. Instead of "clearly illegal" you have "AG blessed in a written opinion and lawyers may disagree." 3. There was no Intelligence Committee back then, so TLAs were more limited in being able to get congressional buy-in for warrantless surveillance. Now there is, and Feinstein (and Rs on it as well, to be sure) have been the biggest defenders of the NSA post-Snowden. They have to be: they were read in on the programs and were complicit in any wrongdoing. Answer: argue there was none! 4. Forty years after the Church Committee, people now may expect to be under surveillance (sadly) and expect FedGov to be corrupt. Look at post-1970s movies like Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, etc. So what would have shocked the average American's conscience 40 years ago may now be almost expected. (This is the boiling-frog theory.) 5. There's a lot more inflation-adjusted $$$ to be made from the surveillance-industrial complex now especially post-9/11 than there was 40+ years ago. It may be an order of magnitude higher. More tax $$$ kicking around == more support in Washington officialdom. I'm sure there are other explanations too but those are the first that come to mind...
  - 12y ago
ableal 12y ago
> Much of this was known before For a time-capsule view of the mood on the issue, there's this 1965 novel by Rex Stout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang It's part of the series about sedentary detective Nero Wolfe, one of my literary guilty pleasures. While being all for law and order, Stout was not too keen on unbridled authority, and his characters would often tweak a policeman's metaphorical nose.

by declan 12y ago

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.

pmoriarty 12y ago
What's changed is that a lot of this surveillance is perfectly legal now. The surveillance state has written itself a blank check.
declan 12y ago
> Where are all the NSA "reforms" now? Yep. It's been ~18 months since we first heard of Edward Snowden, and there have been no significant policy (as in, presidential executive order) or legal changes to NSA surveillance authority. I don't know why there's no modern-day Church committee, but here are a few hypotheses: 1. Sen. Church was running the investigation circa 1975, a few years after Watergate was exposed and a year after Nixon resigned. I suspect there was much more public concern about executive abuses than there are today, and the GOP's willingness to defend the Nixon administration was limited post-Waterage (compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D in the White House). 2. Much of FedGov's surveillance abuses pre-Church were clearly illegal and criminal. The lesson intelligence agencies learned is that, no matter how dodgy the behavior, as long as there's an AG opinion theoretically blessing it, you won't be prosecuted. So the surveillance abuses today may violate the 4A and our sense of proportionality, but they aren't clearly indictable offenses. Instead of "clearly illegal" you have "AG blessed in a written opinion and lawyers may disagree." 3. There was no Intelligence Committee back then, so TLAs were more limited in being able to get congressional buy-in for warrantless surveillance. Now there is, and Feinstein (and Rs on it as well, to be sure) have been the biggest defenders of the NSA post-Snowden. They have to be: they were read in on the programs and were complicit in any wrongdoing. Answer: argue there was none! 4. Forty years after the Church Committee, people now may expect to be under surveillance (sadly) and expect FedGov to be corrupt. Look at post-1970s movies like Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, etc. So what would have shocked the average American's conscience 40 years ago may now be almost expected. (This is the boiling-frog theory.) 5. There's a lot more inflation-adjusted $$$ to be made from the surveillance-industrial complex now especially post-9/11 than there was 40+ years ago. It may be an order of magnitude higher. More tax $$$ kicking around == more support in Washington officialdom. I'm sure there are other explanations too but those are the first that come to mind...
- 12y ago

ableal 12y ago

> Much of this was known before For a time-capsule view of the mood on the issue, there's this 1965 novel by Rex Stout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang It's part of the series about sedentary detective Nero Wolfe, one of my literary guilty pleasures. While being all for law and order, Stout was not too keen on unbridled authority, and his characters would often tweak a policeman's metaphorical nose.