Outgoing FBI director Robert Mueller was asked sharp
questions by a House Judiciary Committee panel about the FBI's massive
collection, intercept, and listening in on millions of phone conversations.
There were two obvious concerns behind the questioning and one concern that should
be a concern to all given the FBI's past. The two obvious ones are the effectiveness
of the phone surveillance operation in light of the failure to head off the
Benghazi and Boston Marathon attacks. The other is the very real danger of
privacy infringement on millions of Americans that have nothing to do with any
real or suspected terrorist activities. The concerns were pretty much the same
ones that President Obama has been assailed on. He has been forced to defend
the administration's actions in the phone surveillance operations. The concerns
are hardly new.
Obama
has let stand and even expanded most of the tough provisions in the Patriot Act
that permit government agencies to check records of business and citizens
groups with minimal checks on how the information can be used and more
particularly used against. Individuals can still be targeted for monitoring and
surveillance if suspected of being a potential terrorist. Organizations and
individuals can still be slapped with so-called roving wiretaps (taps that can
be placed on an individual or group anywhere, anytime) again based on the thinnest
evidence or suspicion. Obama has been assailed, challenged, and now sued by the
ACLU for the National Security Agency phone surveillance operations.
The unstated
concern is the history of the FBI's abuse of its spy powers. At times it badly
crossed the line between the need to defend and protect against legitimate
security threats and just plain citizen spying for citizen's spying sake, and
worse for political intimidation and harassment. This sordid history bears
recounting in light of the current controversy over the FBI's intercept of
thousands of phone calls during the past decade.
The original
FBI spy program was the COINTELPRO program's stated aim
was spelled out in stacks of secret documents released by Senate investigators
in 1976, was to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize"
groups and individuals the FBI considered politically objectionable. Yet in
nearly all of the cases, those targeted by COINTELPRO were neither foreign
spies, terrorists or criminals.
The FBI patterned COINTELPRO on the methods used by its counterintelligence
division and internal security sections during the 1940s and '50s. The arsenal
of dirty tactics they used included unauthorized wiretaps, agent provocateur,
poison-pen letters, "black-bag jobs" (breaking and entering to obtain
intelligence) and the compiling of secret dossiers.
Driven by a grotesque mix of personal racism and paranoia, FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover kicked the program into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI recruited
thousands of "ghetto informants," for their relentless campaign of
harassment and intimidation against African American groups. The bureau even
organized its targets into Orwellian categories agents gave such labels as
"Rabble Rouser Index," "Agitator Index" and "Security Index."
Following the death of Hoover in 1972 and subsequent congressional disclosure
of his illegal program, the Justice Department assured the public that
operations like COINTELPRO were a thing of the past. The department had supposedly
clamped down on all illegal FBI activities.
That was not the case. In the 1980s, the FBI waged a five-year covert spy
campaign against dozens of religious and pacifist groups and leaders that
opposed American foreign policy in Central America.
In the 1990s, the agency mounted yet another series of covert campaigns against
civil rights, environmental and anti-nuclear weapon groups, as well as against
Native American and Arab-American political figures and organizations. FBI
tactics used against those groups were an exact replica of the covert tactics
employed in the 1960s and '70s -- tactics that were supposedly banned.
In 2002, the Bush administration again gave the green light to the FBI to wage
a freewheeling campaign against so-called subversives. This time the new
watchword was "terrorist."
The war on terror gave the FBI a green light to conduct previously illegal
forms of surveillance; plant secret agents in churches, mosques and political
groups; and scour the Internet seeking potential subversives.
Just as in the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the rules gave the FBI unbridled power
to determine who and what groups and individuals it could target. They could
run free, without having to show probable cause of criminal wronging. An internal audit made public in 2010 found the FBI broke the law thousands
of times when requesting American's phone records using fake emergency letters
that were never followed up on with true subpoenas. Top FBI officials knew the
practice was illegal
The FBI is not the soiled FBI of past decades and there are more defined layers
of accountability, and transparency then ever existed during those days. And
with legitimate lethal terrorist threats that the U.S. faces, the FBI must play
a front line role in monitoring potential terrorist activities and nipping them
in the bud. But the history of over reach and outright law breaking by the FBI
and other government agencies still looms large. This history tells us that the
FBI still walks a perilous line between lawful surveillance and outright
political spying.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His
new ebook is America on Trial: The
Slaying of Trayvon Martin ( Amazon ).
He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the
Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson
Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica
Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
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