Who is the Government Spying on Now?

August 22 - 28, 2007 by Maya Harris, The Post Newspaper

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond speaks of a photo he has in his office of Dr. Martin Luther King: “The photograph shows King and Stanley Levison standing outside the Stadler Hotel in New York City, and here’s King talking to a man who was probably his most trusted white friend. A man who helped him in immeasurable ways.”

Although Bond worked closely with King during the civil rights movement, this photo is not from his personal collection. It was taken by the FBI.

“The government photographed them because they believed that Levison was up to some sinister purpose,” explains Bond. “And it made King cautious. It kept out of the movement, at least in a public way, a viable ally and friend, a man of great wisdom and great warmth, someone who was a trusted advisor to King.”

The photo was taken as part of a decades-long operation by the FBI to spy on Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights activists. In fact, the photo was just the tip of the iceberg. For years, the FBI and other government intelligence agencies not only photographed leaders of the civil rights and black liberation movements, they tailed them, infiltrated their organizations, disrupted their meetings, spread lies about them, broke into their offices, read their mail, tapped their phones and tried to discredit them—to their members and the public at large.

I was reminded of that photo as Congress recently debated the government’s current surveillance program. You have to wonder, “Who are they spying on now, and why?”

During the Civil Rights Movement, one particularly infamous government project, COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program], was established precisely to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the movement organizations and its leaders. Black organizations and black leaders were automatically suspect by the federal government. Like his counterparts today, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, justified his spying by stating that these organizations included radical elements that were dangerous to the national security of the United States.

“It was absolutely all about political dissent and crushing people who deviate from what is the common accepted wisdom,” said Julian Bond.

Over the course of its twenty-year history, COINTELPRO spied on many other groups as well: anti-Vietnam War organizers, Puerto Rican activists, Native American occupiers of Alcatraz, anti-war GIs. COINTELPRO was not dismantled until 1976, when a Senate Committee—known as the “Church Committee”—issued a report revealing some its worst excesses: “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…[and] conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association…”

One of the outcomes of the Church Committee was legislation, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to restrict the unlawful surveillance of American citizens by U.S. intelligence agencies. FISA created a special court to oversee government claims of “foreign intelligence activities” and requests for warrants.

However, after 9/11, President Bush completely circumvented FISA, claiming the Administration could not comply with FISA without jeopardizing national security. So, in recent years, the National Security Agency has been intercepting and monitoring the phone calls and records of millions of Americans without warrants.

That’s why the ACLU brought the lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, arguing that unchecked government spying has no place in a democratic society.

History shows us that the chilling effect of government surveillance threatens open public debate and the very fabric of our democracy. Individuals must be able to exercise their constitutional rights without fear of being watched, or having their conversations listened to and their mail opened.

This was true when the FBI tailed Dr. King and it is true today.

For more information on government surveillance today, please visit http://www.aclunc.org/issues/government_surveillance/index.shtml.