The New FBI Powers: COINTELPRO on Steroids

• 
  This article can be used as inherency evidence to show the growth of government surveillance.
  
• 
  This article can be used as part of a privacy advantage because it details how surveillance programs often bypass due process and warrant requirements.
  
• 
  This article can be used to answer surveillance good arguments, because the author explains how the same unsavory, and in some case illegal, tactics used by COINTELPRO are still in use.
  

Listen closely and what you will hear, beneath the babble of political chatter and other mindless political noises distracting you from what’s really going on, are the dying squeals of the Fourth Amendment. It dies a little more with every no-knock raid that is carried out by a SWAT team, every phone call eavesdropped on by FBI agents, and every piece of legislation passed that further undermines the right of every American to be free from governmental intrusions into their private affairs.

Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner are exchanging political niceties on the golf course, Congress is doing their utmost to be as ineffective as possible, and the Tea Party—once thought to be an alternative to politics as usual—is clowning around with candidates who, upon election, have proven to be no better than their predecessors and just as untrustworthy when it comes to protecting our rights and our interests. Yet no matter how hard Americans work to insulate themselves from the harsh realities of life today—endless wars, crippling debt, sustained unemployment, a growing homeless population, rising food and gas prices, morally bankrupt and corrupt politicians, plummeting literacy rates, and on and on—there can be no ignoring the steady drumbeat of the police state marching in lockstep with our government.

Incredibly, with little outcry from the populace, the lengths to which the government will go in its quest for total control have become more extreme with every passing day. Now comes the news that the FBI intends to grant to its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers that include relaxing restrictions on a low-level category of investigations termed “assessments.” This allows FBI agents to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect individuals, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing. (Incredibly, during the four-month period running from December 2008 to March 2009, the FBI initiated close to 12,000 assessments of individuals and organizations, and that was before the rules were further relaxed.)

This latest relaxing of the rules, justified as a way to cut down on cumbersome record-keeping, will allow the FBI significant new powers to search law enforcement and private databases, go through household trash, and deploy surveillance teams, with even fewer checks against abuse. The point, of course, is that if agents aren’t required to maintain a paper trail documenting their activities, there can be no way to hold the government accountable for subsequent abuses.

These new powers, detailed in a forthcoming edition of the FBI’s operations manual, extend the agency’s reach into the lives of average Americans and effectively transform the citizenry into a nation of suspects, reversing the burden of proof so that we are now all guilty until proven innocent. Thus, no longer do agents need evidence of possible criminal or terrorist activity in order to launch an investigation. Now, they can “proactively” look into people and groups, searching databases without making a record about it, conducting lie detector tests and searching people’s trash.

Moreover, as FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni revealed, agents want to be able to use the information found in a subject’s trash to pressure that person to assist in a government investigation. Under the new guidelines, surveillance squads can also be deployed repeatedly to follow “targets,” agents can infiltrate organizations for longer periods of time before certain undisclosed “rules” kick in, and public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars can be investigated without the need for extra supervision.

All of this has been sanctioned by the Obama administration, which, as the New York Times aptly notes, “has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans’ basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism” and now “seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did.” In fact, this steady erosion of our rights started long before Bush came into office. Indeed, it has little to do with political affiliation and everything to do with an entrenched bureaucratic mindset—call it the “Establishment,” if you like—that, in its quest to amass and retain power, seeks to function autonomously and independent of the Constitution.

What we are witnessing is a coup d’etat that is aimed at overthrowing our representative government and replacing it with one that outwardly may appear to embrace democratic ideals but inwardly is nothing more than an authoritarian regime. And the Establishment is counting on the fact that Americans will gullibly continue to trust the government and turn a blind eye to its power grabs and abuses.

The relationship between the American people and their government was once defined by a social contract (the U.S. Constitution) that was predicated on a mutual respect for the rule of law and a clear understanding that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around. That is no longer the case. Having ceded to the government all manner of control over our lives, renouncing our claims to such things as privacy in exchange for the phantom promise of security, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being trapped in a prison of our own making.

It is a phenomenon that Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” Or to put it another way: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Unfortunately, in the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we have become the nails to the government’s hammer. After all, having equipped government agents with an arsenal of tools, weapons and powers with which to vanquish the so-called forces of terror, it was inevitable that that same arsenal would eventually be turned on us. As Michael German, a former FBI agent, recently observed, “You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find terrorism. Fortunately, there isn’t a lot of terrorism in many communities. So they end up pursuing people who are critical of the government.”

One such person is Scott Crow, a relatively obscure political activist who has been the object of intense surveillance by FBI counterterrorism agents. Other targets of bureau surveillance, according to the New York Times, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. “When such investigations produce no criminal charges,” notes the Times, “their methods rarely come to light publicly.”

In the case of Scott Crow, those methods were revealed as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request to see the FBI file on him. At a massive 440 pages, Crow’s file speaks volumes about the way in which the government views the American people as a whole—as potential threats to national security, not to mention what it says about the leeway given to the FBI to completely disregard the Fourth Amendment’s protections against searches and seizures of our property and persons. Over the course of at least three years, Crow had agents staking out his house, tracking the comings and goings of visitors, monitoring his phone calls, mail and email, sifting through his trash, infiltrating his circle of friends, and even monitoring him round the clock with a video camera attached to a phone pole across the street from his house.

Given that no criminal charges whatsoever were ever levied against Crow, it might appear that the agency went overboard in its efforts to monitor his activities, but as the FBI’s new manual reveals, such surveillance—even in the absence of credible evidence suggesting wrongdoing—is par for the course. For the federal government to go to such expense (taxpayer expense, that is) and trouble over a political activist, in particular, might seem rather paranoid. However, that is exactly what we are dealing with—a government that is increasingly paranoid about having its authority challenged and determined to discourage such challenges by inciting fear in people.

Then again, this is nothing new. Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed Cointelpro, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents. According to the Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating Cointelpro abuses, “Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone ‘bugs,’ surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens.” The report continued:

Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.

Commenting on the methods employed by the FBI in the implementation of Cointelpro, the Church Committee noted, “The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.” The Committee added, “While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the ‘national security’ or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a ‘potential’ for violence—and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave ‘aid and comfort’ to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.”

Following the Church Committee’s report, then-Attorney General Edward Levi implemented a set of guidelines designed to preclude FBI abuse regarding domestic investigations. These guidelines were tweaked by subsequent Attorneys General, substantially relaxed by Attorney General John Ashcroft following the September 11 attacks, further weakened by AG Michael Mukasey in 2008, and now under Eric Holder, any such restrictions are just about nonexistent.

Thus, it would seem we’re back to where we started, only this time we’re facing Cointelpro on steroids—pumped up on the government’s self-righteous quest to ferret out peace activists and dissidents and energized by an arsenal of invasive technologies that make the phone tapping equipment of the 1960s look like Tinker Toys. In fact, this modern period of FBI lawlessness resembles Cointelpro operations in a variety of ways. In both instances, the FBI singled out outspoken critics of the Establishment for scrutiny, attempted to assign them terrorist ties (none were found), and continued the investigations long past the point at which they were found not guilty of having committed any crimes. For example, an attorney for those targeted in a September 2011 FBI raid—including an activist-minded couple that sells silkscreened baby outfits and other clothes with phrases like “Help Wanted: Revolutionaries”—describes his clients as “public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders.”

With all of the so-called threats coming from outside the country, why is the government expending so much energy on a relatively small group of peace and anti-war activists whose First Amendment activities comprise the totality of their “suspicious” behavior? It’s the hammer and nail analogy again. Having acquired all of these new tools and powers post-9/11, of course the government wants to hold onto them and what better way to do so than by using them to ferret out “potential” threats. A prime example occurred in 2002, when the FBI dispatched a special agent, armed with a camera, to a peace rally to search for terrorism suspects who might happen to be there, just to “see what they are doing.” The protest was sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an organization dedicated to advocating peaceful solutions to international conflicts, and composed primarily of individuals distributing leaflets. The Office of Inspector General, in its report on FBI surveillance of domestic organizations, characterized the task provided to the special agent assigned to the Merton protest as a “make-work” project.

Mark my words: we’re going to find, as time goes on and we come under greater and greater surveillance, that we have all become part of the government’s “make-work” project. What this means is that in order to justify their existence and earn their pay, they’ll be investigating perfectly harmless, innocent citizens.

So what’s to be done?

First, the American people need to get their heads out of the sand and their butts off the couches and act like rea Americans for a change. And by that I mean taking to the streets and truly protesting this deplorable state of our nation. March on Washington, march on your town hall—but whatever you do, make your voices heard. If they can do it in Europe and China and the Middle East, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t do it here.

Second, once we’ve gotten Congress’ attention, we need to push for a legislative response to these FBI abuses. It can be done, but it will take Americans coming together across party lines and calling for Congress to pass legislation restoring the Fourth Amendment and restricting what government agents can do, especially without a court order. Congress may be largely corrupt and incompetent, but with the right kind of citizen pressure, changes can be had. Whatever you do, however, beware of promises made on the campaign trail. As we have seen repeatedly, they never stick.

Third, act now before it’s too late. That dying squeal, the sound of the Fourth Amendment having been gutted and bleeding to death, is getting fainter and fainter. Once it goes silent, there’ll be no turning back.
Race, Surveillance, & Empire

Citation: Kundani, Arun & Kumar, Deepa. (2015). Race, Surveillance, & Empire. International Socialist Review. Retrieved 12/28/15. http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire

Kundani & Kumar Article Summary: The authors of this article are making an argument that government surveillance, and law enforcement in general, has been used to reproduce racial oppression. Secondly, the authors argue that the same surveillance programs used to target racial minorities, especially Arab Muslims, were also implemented to spy on anti-neoliberal movements like Occupy Wall Street.

Kundani & Kumar Strategic Points:

• 
  This article can be a key piece to a racism advantage for an affirmative case.
  
• 
  This article can be used to show that Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately targets of surveillance for no other reason than apparent racism.
  
• 
  This article can be used to make arguments stating that discussion of racism and imperialism should be the focus of debates on surveillance.
  
• 
  This article can be used as impact evidence with racism or imperialism as the impact.
  

Beginning in June 2013, a series of news articles based on whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s collection of documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) took the world by storm. Over the course of a year, the Snowden material provided a detailed account of the massive extent of NSA’s warrantless data collection. What became clear was that the NSA was involved in the mass collection of online material. Less apparent was how this data was actually used by the NSA and other national security agencies. Part of the answer came in July 2014 when Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain published an article that identified specific targets of NSA surveillance and showed how individuals were being placed under surveillance despite there being no reasonable suspicion of their involvement in criminal activity.¹ All of those named as targets were prominent Muslim Americans.

The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux published another story for The Intercept, which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people on the National Counterterrorism Center’s no-fly list had increased tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified documents showed that the NCC maintains a database of terrorism suspects worldwide—the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment—which contained a million names by 2013, double the number four years earlier, and increasingly includes biometric data. This database includes 20,800 persons within the United States who are disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan, with its significant Arab American population.²

By any objective standard, these were major news stories that ought to have attracted as much attention as the earlier revelations. Yet the stories barely registered in the corporate media landscape. The “tech community,” which had earlier expressed outrage at the NSA’s mass digital surveillance, seemed to be indifferent when details emerged of the targeted surveillance of Muslims. The explanation for this reaction is not hard to find. While many object to the US government collecting private data on “ordinary” people, Muslims tend to be seen as reasonable targets of suspicion. A July 2014 poll for the Arab American Institute found that 42 percent of Americans think it is justifiable for law enforcement agencies to profile Arab Americans or American Muslims.³

In what follows, we argue that the debate on national security surveillance that has emerged in the United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for the ways national security surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective in making sense of it and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire. 

The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of moments in the history of national security surveillance in North America, tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital, from the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is on how race as a sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in the United States through systems of surveillance. We show how throughout the history of the United States the systematic collection of information has been interwoven with mechanisms of racial oppression. From Anglo settler-colonialism, the establishment of the plantation system, the post–Civil War reconstruction era, the US conquest of the Philippines, and the emergence of the national security state in the post-World War II era, to neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era, racialized surveillance has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire.  

It is, however, important to note that the production of the racial “other” at these various moments is conjunctural and heterogenous. That is, the racialization of Native Americans, for instance, during the settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of African Americans. Further, the dominant construction of Blackness under slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the neoliberal era; these ideological shifts are the product of specific historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at various moments, determine who will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and for how long.

In the second part, we turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape national security surveillance practices. The intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has been carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements such as Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order. This is not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s were passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied for Washington’s army in the American Revolution. State surveillance regimes have always sought to monitor and penalize a wide range of dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no means all of these cases. Our focus here is on the production of racialized “others” as security threats and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations.

Further, the current system of mass surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of racialized security surveillance that feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the Obama administration and that disproportionately target African Americans, contributing to their mass incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as the New Jim Crow.⁴ We argue that racialized groupings are produced in the very act of collecting information about certain groups deemed as “threats” by the national security state—the Brown terrorist, the Black and Brown drug dealer and user, and the immigrant who threatens to steal jobs. We conclude that “security” has become one of the primary means through which racism is ideologically reproduced in the “post-racial,” neoliberal era. Drawing on W. E. B. Dubois’s notion of the “psychological wage,” we argue that neoliberalism has been legitimized in part through racialized notions of security that offer a new “psychological wage” as compensation for the decline of the social wage and its reallocation to “homeland security.”