Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter
F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital
affairs if he did not commit suicide.
If anyone saw the movie "A Serious Man", you may remember that the protagonist's employer received anonymous poison pen letters regarding himself. I know someone that happened to in real life. His name is Louis Proyect. He was a student in the 1960s and got involved with the anti-war movement, and then became a programmer at Metropolitan Life still active in the anti-war movement. The FBI used to send anonymous poison pen letters to his employer, Met Life, in order to try to get him fired.
Actually he got his hands on some FOIA documents after a lawsuit, he has some of them on his web page:
Until 2013 it was possible to think that the NSA spying wasn't really pervasive, wasn't really against all Americans. Now we know better, but we still think that NSA blackmailing of politicians and others is just too out there, conspiracy theory.
But the government has already done exactly that, and probably more. And they'll do it again. Dick Cheney's office outed a covert CIA spy for political revenge.
Every overly powerful organization, whether government, corporate or just personal wealth, will be corrupted eventually, because they will inevitably attract corrupt people.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. As bad as we think the NSA is today the FBI in its "glory days" under Hoover were far, far worse. McCarthy was far worse. "Existential risk to the republic" worse.
The NSA is not "that bad", yet, probably. But the potential is there, if anything the potential for badness is far worse and the ability to reign it in seemingly diminished.
Edit: Also, the fundamental problem today is not the NSA, it's just a symptom. Even if we completely defunded the NSA tomorrow as well as put every NSA employee on a rocket and shot them into the Sun it would still not solve the underlying problem and it would just be a matter of time before we'd be facing the same issues from some other direction.
The problem is that the constitution has been weakened, in pretty much every way. But one important aspect to that is the idea that things that happen on the internet aren't "real" in some basic way that makes the absence of legal protection of fundamental liberties online acceptable.
In the wake of Nelson Mandela's death, there were a lot of people who expressed the sentiment that he was not actually a great man, because he espoused violence, because he blew things up, etc.
I've seen similar sentiments expressed about Dr. King. In short, he was a womanizer who does not deserve our praise. He is lauded for political purposes.
It makes me wonder if the government embraces, and perhaps even plants, ideas like this. Nobody is perfect, and the more stuff somebody accomplishes, the less perfect they're likely to be. No hero will be without something like this to tarnish their image. By convincing the public that a hero should be perfect, they can hold their past transgressions over them in order to gain compliance, as the FBI tried to do here. They can control the narrative afterwards, by concentrating on the flaws of heroes they don't like, and ignoring the flaws of those they do.
It certainly seems to have happened in politics, anyway. Few candidates with anything interesting to say make it to office, since they inevitably have something pointless but "scandalous" in their past. If they do, then the threat of exposure should work wonders for getting them to behave.
That's one of the least nasty things they did... they've intentionally infected thousands of people with nasty diseases, overthrown democratically elected governments, assisted in military coups, cheated, lied and stolen for years and years.
It is hard to conceive of the risk faced by these folks in order to carry out what was in effect an act of civil disobedience -for no personal gain.
Bravo!
Unfortunately it looks like such courageous folks are the last remaining defense against absolute tyranny in the United States.
One wonders how many such actions are even possible with the advent of the global surveillance state?
What strikes me is how little was gained by both sides in this, and how futile their actions seem in hindsight.
History probably would have ended up in a similar way if Hoover had not devoted so many resources to spying on Viet Nam protestors and counter culture revolutionaries. He was really pursuing his lifelong obsession with communism, which was another political movement that probably would have died without so much government surveillance. His spying didn't do anything to dissuade Martin Luther King or other members of the Civil Rights movement. All that effort and violation of privacy for a difficult to discern impact on history.
Stealing and publishing documents from the FBI didn't seem to have much of an impact either. There was a temporary public outcry, some commissions were established and the whole thing was forgotten in less than a decade. We just wound up in the same situation 40 years later and will most likely end up with the same results. It takes a mountain of courage to steal from the freaking FBI, and that group of people deserve credit for standing up for what they believed in. If only their risk produced a more appreciable reward for society.
I fear a never ending cycle of surveillance and protest. Chicken and the egg. The stakes seem higher now, on both sides, but there are no guarantees that we won't go through the whole process again to achieve the same non-result. We need to figure out how to use the political process instead of theft to stop our government agencies from doing things that we don't like. Or else we'll be reading this same story again decades from now.
> What strikes me is how little was gained by both sides in this, and how futile their actions seem in hindsight.
To quote Chuck Palahniuk: "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
If you give history enough time, it will always look like little has been gained in terms of eradicating oppression. Sure, some forms of oppression don't exist anymore, but society evolves other forms as a replacement.
I don't honestly believe we'll ever "figure out how to use the political process [...] to stop our government agencies from doing things that we don't like." I think history is like a power game where rules keep changing over time because one side keeps finding ways to rig the game. Sooner or later, there's enough evidence that the game is rigged and the other side realizes that it's futile to keep playing by the same rules and finds a new way to fight back.
A lot was gained. Proof. And continued exposure of what government's really do with all that power: they protect it. That knowledge is always there, all you have to do is read. Not everyone does, but it's enough that it's there.
"Stealing and publishing documents from the FBI didn't seem to have much of an impact either. There was a temporary public outcry, some commissions were established and the whole thing was forgotten in less than a decade."
I think what they did was both brave and highly valuable. They went through great risks to ignite a spark among their fellow citizens, so they would join them in opposing these practices.
It's a shame that the majority of their fellow citizens decided to ignore the problem. I too fear that we're going into "never ending cycle of surveillance and protest", but because democracy requires active participation from citizens, and these rarely do anything but complain and, sometimes, vote.
there are more than those two sides. this definitely altered the balance between the left and right in the US. this lead to shutting down COINTELPRO, the PRISM of that age.
It seems axiomatic that there will be a never ending cycle of contention regarding the limits of government power. The government, the citizens, and lawbreakers are all in essence living beings, and as such will compete for resources. It's your role as a citizen to push back.
And the Church Commission, a partial result of these documents coming to light, had real consequences, and imposed real limits on government power.
If the government was scary powerful then, it is terrifying now.
If you've ever protested anything in the USA, regardless if on the left or right, you can almost certainly count on your name on some kind of tracking, and they've given themselves legal permission, because they don't have to look at the data in real-time anymore. They can just store it and look at it later on demand if they want with frictionless warrants from courts with no lawyer "for the people" present.
If the government feels you've become an annoyance they can just pop you on a no-fly list without court review and no-way to get off. And heaven help you if you go near a border if they've peaked their interest in you, all your data is theirs without any need for warrant or even a reason.
The government has also learned the secret that if they want to control the message, they just have to limit media exposure. Release news late on a Friday and it will be gone by Monday. Control court trials to the point where there is no audio or video and TV news will almost certainly not cover it. They are getting incredibly good at this.
The newest corruption since 9/11 is to insist they need super powers for anti-terrorism, then use them against average criminals. Even worse, if no real criminals can be found, manufacturer one by constantly harassing some dupe until they do something half-assed and then roll them out for the cameras to justify the insane budgets and overeaching powers.
If you've protested something? WRONG. I cannot emphasize enough that they do not restrict surveillance to suspected protestors or terrorists. They spy on everyone and every device they possibly can.
EVERYBODY is being spied on right now. There is NO preselection of who gets spied on and who doesn't. They are using fake mobile cell towers, packet injection, deep packet inspection, and actively attempt to infect ANY computer they can in ANY way they can.
They are spying on you right now. They possibly have webcam photos of you. They possibly have some of your passwords, personal communications, and other info they try to collect ON EVERYONE.
I see most of the interesting comments here so far are from a strictly American perspective, that is just commenting on what was happening in the United States then or is happening in the United States now. But of course there is more than one country in the world. In another place I have lived[1] a supposedly democratic government that in fact was a dictatorship engaged in comprehensive spying on all civil society organizations--not just the organizations that were formally opposition organizations--and stifled all mass media organizations with censorship. That didn't stop a people-power democracy movement from starting and succeeding in democratizing that country. I've advised Hacker News participants before[2] that people power democracy movements to overthrow dictatorships with comprehensive surveillance programs are not easy, but they can succeed. You and I need mental toughness, persistence, and courage to be part of the solution, but what better reward for those virtues is there than expanded freedom (and the dignity of knowing you did the right thing)? Don't give up. Keep on organizing to gain freedom and protect civil rights.
My guess is that things will have to get worse before they can get better, that it's paradoxically easier to democratically overthrow a true dictatorship than the sort of increasingly-oppressive democracy we see in the US.
I say this because most Americans are generally happy with the system. There are aspects they dislike, and lots of results they dislike, but there is still deep respect for the system itself in the people. I think the system may have reached a point where it no longer works well, but it still gives the appearance of doing so.
Dictatorships famously have rigged elections to give the regime the appearance of democracy. However, nobody actually believes it. The dictator wins roughly 99.44% of the vote and everybody knows the election is a sham.
Here, we have pretty decent elections that are mostly fair and well contested, but which ultimately don't accomplish much. We end up choosing between two candidates who have few differences when it comes to how they'll handle civil liberties, elections, third parties, and such. But the vast majority of the population doesn't see it that way, and so the election, and the system as a whole, is seen as legitimate even though it doesn't really work.
Worse, the system manages to control public opinion to perpetuate itself. Most Americans are deeply afraid of terrorism and welcome extreme measures to fight it. Expressing the idea that we should prosecute terrorists as common criminals and accept the occasional mass-casualty attack gets you labeled as a crazy person. This despite the fact that terrorism is a minor threat to our lives compared to almost every other way we can potentially die, even when you restrict it to ways you can die by being killed intentionally by other humans.
Just like elections, the propaganda machine is seen as legitimate, unlike in a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, the state news agency works as a government mouthpiece and nobody believes what they say. In the US, nominally independent media organizations work as mouthpieces of the government but since there are a bunch of them, and they're nominally independent, and they express what appears to be a wide range of views (which is actually only wide within the narrow range of what's considered mainstream), people respect them.
I'm not saying that it's hopeless or that we should give up the fight. But I do think that it's not entirely right to point out successes in overt dictatorships as proof that the current situation in the US can be fixed. I may be wrong, but it is possible that the current situation is good enough to make it far more difficult to actually improve it.
I wouldn't put it past the current government to try and push through a new bill so that they could remove the statute of limitations in cases like this where "national security was compromised", so that they can now still prosecute the "traitors".
I also wouldn't put it past the current government to use that new power to then posthumously prosecute Mr. Davidon who "died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease".
Call me cynical, but nothing that USG does to further "protect" its "national security" would surprise me anymore.
Going after these people would actually hurt Governmental Security. Forty years after the fact, this case just helps perpetuate the idea of soft rebellion successfully pushing back against the system (one of the bases of mainstream American politics). Meanwhile the system has adopted (organizational compartmentalization and physical security will prevent this attack from recurring) and level of routine surveillance has continually grown.
It's interesting how history repeats itself. This is the story of how we ended up with the FISA court. The lesson for us is that need to be careful that whatever reforms we make to fix the NSA won't be used in even worse ways in the future.
It likely will be. The bad side-effect is that they have now measured exactly what the tolerance to this is -- t\it wasn't that bad a of a reaction from the general population. HN/Reddit and other communities are too small compared to the general population. Now what can happen, is they can be more brazen in their actions and take it up a couple of more notches, as the saying goes.
For example, they know that we know, so no need to expend much effort hiding their tactics and methods. You do something they don't like? They can clearly just send an agent or make a phone call. You did something undesirable but not necessarily illegal, well they might go back 2 years and listen to how you confessed to your partner that you cheated on your IRS taxes that year. You might get a "friendly" reminder from them about that conversation and what it could do if IRS got that info.
Another level of this is people start assuming they are omniscient and omnipotent in gathering information. They become the de-facto record keepers. If there is a dispute about a fact, they can chime and say that well "on Friday, November 15, 20:30, you made a phone call and you confessed to this crime". Whether that happened or not, might not matter, what matters is that they could make it up and many will take their word for it.
As I read more about this, I wonder if there has yet been a powerful intel (or otherwise secret) government organization that hasn't abused its power in some major way. Without organizations that can keep secrets, you lose a lot of options (such as undercover operations, and surprise nuclear defence systems), but I wonder if you can't draw parallels to open source.
When your government is "closed source", the risks are higher as there are less checks and balances. But maybe, like many open source efforts, keeping the government entirely transparent would increase efficiency enough to make up for the types of operations that you can no longer undertake.
Yeah, the video starts automatically. I didn't get a popup window at all. I have no blocking mechanisms activated besides what's already in stock Mozilla Firefox.
[+] [-] selmnoo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firstOrder|12 years ago|reply
Actually he got his hands on some FOIA documents after a lawsuit, he has some of them on his web page:
http://louisproyect.org/2007/08/19/encounters-with-the-fbi
[+] [-] afterburner|12 years ago|reply
This is why the NSA revelations are so scary. This kind of stuff has already been done, and the NSA could do it so much worse, to so many more people.
[+] [-] a3n|12 years ago|reply
Until 2013 it was possible to think that the NSA spying wasn't really pervasive, wasn't really against all Americans. Now we know better, but we still think that NSA blackmailing of politicians and others is just too out there, conspiracy theory.
But the government has already done exactly that, and probably more. And they'll do it again. Dick Cheney's office outed a covert CIA spy for political revenge.
Every overly powerful organization, whether government, corporate or just personal wealth, will be corrupted eventually, because they will inevitably attract corrupt people.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
The NSA is not "that bad", yet, probably. But the potential is there, if anything the potential for badness is far worse and the ability to reign it in seemingly diminished.
Edit: Also, the fundamental problem today is not the NSA, it's just a symptom. Even if we completely defunded the NSA tomorrow as well as put every NSA employee on a rocket and shot them into the Sun it would still not solve the underlying problem and it would just be a matter of time before we'd be facing the same issues from some other direction.
The problem is that the constitution has been weakened, in pretty much every way. But one important aspect to that is the idea that things that happen on the internet aren't "real" in some basic way that makes the absence of legal protection of fundamental liberties online acceptable.
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
I've seen similar sentiments expressed about Dr. King. In short, he was a womanizer who does not deserve our praise. He is lauded for political purposes.
It makes me wonder if the government embraces, and perhaps even plants, ideas like this. Nobody is perfect, and the more stuff somebody accomplishes, the less perfect they're likely to be. No hero will be without something like this to tarnish their image. By convincing the public that a hero should be perfect, they can hold their past transgressions over them in order to gain compliance, as the FBI tried to do here. They can control the narrative afterwards, by concentrating on the flaws of heroes they don't like, and ignoring the flaws of those they do.
It certainly seems to have happened in politics, anyway. Few candidates with anything interesting to say make it to office, since they inevitably have something pointless but "scandalous" in their past. If they do, then the threat of exposure should work wonders for getting them to behave.
[+] [-] grecy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfreeman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suprgeek|12 years ago|reply
Bravo!
Unfortunately it looks like such courageous folks are the last remaining defense against absolute tyranny in the United States. One wonders how many such actions are even possible with the advent of the global surveillance state?
[+] [-] joe_the_user|12 years ago|reply
The bigger question now is whether his revelations can create any change.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hooande|12 years ago|reply
History probably would have ended up in a similar way if Hoover had not devoted so many resources to spying on Viet Nam protestors and counter culture revolutionaries. He was really pursuing his lifelong obsession with communism, which was another political movement that probably would have died without so much government surveillance. His spying didn't do anything to dissuade Martin Luther King or other members of the Civil Rights movement. All that effort and violation of privacy for a difficult to discern impact on history.
Stealing and publishing documents from the FBI didn't seem to have much of an impact either. There was a temporary public outcry, some commissions were established and the whole thing was forgotten in less than a decade. We just wound up in the same situation 40 years later and will most likely end up with the same results. It takes a mountain of courage to steal from the freaking FBI, and that group of people deserve credit for standing up for what they believed in. If only their risk produced a more appreciable reward for society.
I fear a never ending cycle of surveillance and protest. Chicken and the egg. The stakes seem higher now, on both sides, but there are no guarantees that we won't go through the whole process again to achieve the same non-result. We need to figure out how to use the political process instead of theft to stop our government agencies from doing things that we don't like. Or else we'll be reading this same story again decades from now.
[+] [-] CodeMage|12 years ago|reply
To quote Chuck Palahniuk: "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
If you give history enough time, it will always look like little has been gained in terms of eradicating oppression. Sure, some forms of oppression don't exist anymore, but society evolves other forms as a replacement.
I don't honestly believe we'll ever "figure out how to use the political process [...] to stop our government agencies from doing things that we don't like." I think history is like a power game where rules keep changing over time because one side keeps finding ways to rig the game. Sooner or later, there's enough evidence that the game is rigged and the other side realizes that it's futile to keep playing by the same rules and finds a new way to fight back.
[+] [-] a3n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmngomes|12 years ago|reply
I think what they did was both brave and highly valuable. They went through great risks to ignite a spark among their fellow citizens, so they would join them in opposing these practices.
It's a shame that the majority of their fellow citizens decided to ignore the problem. I too fear that we're going into "never ending cycle of surveillance and protest", but because democracy requires active participation from citizens, and these rarely do anything but complain and, sometimes, vote.
[+] [-] hansjorg|12 years ago|reply
If I recall correctly, the fall out conveniently drowned in noise from the Watergate affair.
Watergate was silly childs play compared to the COINTELPRO revelations though.
[+] [-] spot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mturmon|12 years ago|reply
And the Church Commission, a partial result of these documents coming to light, had real consequences, and imposed real limits on government power.
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
If you've ever protested anything in the USA, regardless if on the left or right, you can almost certainly count on your name on some kind of tracking, and they've given themselves legal permission, because they don't have to look at the data in real-time anymore. They can just store it and look at it later on demand if they want with frictionless warrants from courts with no lawyer "for the people" present.
If the government feels you've become an annoyance they can just pop you on a no-fly list without court review and no-way to get off. And heaven help you if you go near a border if they've peaked their interest in you, all your data is theirs without any need for warrant or even a reason.
The government has also learned the secret that if they want to control the message, they just have to limit media exposure. Release news late on a Friday and it will be gone by Monday. Control court trials to the point where there is no audio or video and TV news will almost certainly not cover it. They are getting incredibly good at this.
The newest corruption since 9/11 is to insist they need super powers for anti-terrorism, then use them against average criminals. Even worse, if no real criminals can be found, manufacturer one by constantly harassing some dupe until they do something half-assed and then roll them out for the cameras to justify the insane budgets and overeaching powers.
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|12 years ago|reply
EVERYBODY is being spied on right now. There is NO preselection of who gets spied on and who doesn't. They are using fake mobile cell towers, packet injection, deep packet inspection, and actively attempt to infect ANY computer they can in ANY way they can.
They are spying on you right now. They possibly have webcam photos of you. They possibly have some of your passwords, personal communications, and other info they try to collect ON EVERYONE.
Don't believe me? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLT7ao1V8vY
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336795
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
I say this because most Americans are generally happy with the system. There are aspects they dislike, and lots of results they dislike, but there is still deep respect for the system itself in the people. I think the system may have reached a point where it no longer works well, but it still gives the appearance of doing so.
Dictatorships famously have rigged elections to give the regime the appearance of democracy. However, nobody actually believes it. The dictator wins roughly 99.44% of the vote and everybody knows the election is a sham.
Here, we have pretty decent elections that are mostly fair and well contested, but which ultimately don't accomplish much. We end up choosing between two candidates who have few differences when it comes to how they'll handle civil liberties, elections, third parties, and such. But the vast majority of the population doesn't see it that way, and so the election, and the system as a whole, is seen as legitimate even though it doesn't really work.
Worse, the system manages to control public opinion to perpetuate itself. Most Americans are deeply afraid of terrorism and welcome extreme measures to fight it. Expressing the idea that we should prosecute terrorists as common criminals and accept the occasional mass-casualty attack gets you labeled as a crazy person. This despite the fact that terrorism is a minor threat to our lives compared to almost every other way we can potentially die, even when you restrict it to ways you can die by being killed intentionally by other humans.
Just like elections, the propaganda machine is seen as legitimate, unlike in a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, the state news agency works as a government mouthpiece and nobody believes what they say. In the US, nominally independent media organizations work as mouthpieces of the government but since there are a bunch of them, and they're nominally independent, and they express what appears to be a wide range of views (which is actually only wide within the narrow range of what's considered mainstream), people respect them.
I'm not saying that it's hopeless or that we should give up the fight. But I do think that it's not entirely right to point out successes in overt dictatorships as proof that the current situation in the US can be fixed. I may be wrong, but it is possible that the current situation is good enough to make it far more difficult to actually improve it.
[+] [-] junto|12 years ago|reply
I also wouldn't put it past the current government to use that new power to then posthumously prosecute Mr. Davidon who "died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease".
Call me cynical, but nothing that USG does to further "protect" its "national security" would surprise me anymore.
[+] [-] jessedhillon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshfraser|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|12 years ago|reply
For example, they know that we know, so no need to expend much effort hiding their tactics and methods. You do something they don't like? They can clearly just send an agent or make a phone call. You did something undesirable but not necessarily illegal, well they might go back 2 years and listen to how you confessed to your partner that you cheated on your IRS taxes that year. You might get a "friendly" reminder from them about that conversation and what it could do if IRS got that info.
Another level of this is people start assuming they are omniscient and omnipotent in gathering information. They become the de-facto record keepers. If there is a dispute about a fact, they can chime and say that well "on Friday, November 15, 20:30, you made a phone call and you confessed to this crime". Whether that happened or not, might not matter, what matters is that they could make it up and many will take their word for it.
[+] [-] pedalpete|12 years ago|reply
Really looking forward to reading the book.
[+] [-] a3n|12 years ago|reply
Follow the links out from there.
[+] [-] pivnicek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotAgain|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Also interesting that today they would be called home grown terrorists instead of anti-war activists.
[+] [-] oinksoft|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oskarth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taek|12 years ago|reply
When your government is "closed source", the risks are higher as there are less checks and balances. But maybe, like many open source efforts, keeping the government entirely transparent would increase efficiency enough to make up for the types of operations that you can no longer undertake.
[+] [-] pistle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strathmeyer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ersii|12 years ago|reply