16 October 1999
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 13:24:31 -0400
To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: FC: The Privacy Snatchers
One response to my column this week "PRIVACY IS AN "ANTISOCIAL ACT"
<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,31937,00.html>:
>Since when were limits on police power "antisocial"? Ensuring the function
>of a democracy is a highly social act. The Justice Department accusation
> reminds me of "communist!" in the '50's.
It's useful to consider precedent. Forthwith, this history.
-Declan
http://www.pathfinder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,12609,00.html
The Privacy Snatchers
By Declan McCullagh
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.
In these cases, police violated the law by
eavesdropping without a judge's approval, which
the Constitution requires. Now the FBI wants to
require Americans to use only computers and
telephones with a secret backdoor. Such easy
access is the fantasy of every unethical policeman
and corrupt bureaucrat. Of course, they pledge
never to use it without court authorization. Can we
trust them?
Martin Luther King
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.
Hoover's legacy? The FBI headquarters proudly
bears his name today.
Mail Monitoring
Opening mail may be an imprecise form of
surveillance, but that didn't stop the FBI and CIA
from surreptitiously reading hundreds of thousands
of letters from 1940 to 1973. Government
employees (who took special classes to learn this
skill) would stealthily open the envelope and
photograph whatever was inside.
The CIA did it randomly. One agent testified before
Congress, "You never know what you would hit."
Included in the agency's dragnet were three U.S.
senators, a congressman, a presidential
candidate and many business and civil rights
leaders.
Under federal law, opening mail not addressed to
you results in fines of up to $2,000 and five years
in jail. But not one agent appears to have been
prosecuted.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Even the personal life of the First Lady of the
United States is fair game to the eavesdrop
establishment.
In March 1943 Eleanor Roosevelt checked into
Chicago's Blackstone Hotel on her way to Seattle.
In addition to bugging her rooms, the Army
Counter-Intelligence Corps followed her whenever
she left the hotel.
Her crime: endorsing left-wing organizations such
as the YMCA and the American League for Peace
and Democracy.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover hated Mrs.
Roosevelt. He ordered the FBI to investigate Edith
Helm, Mrs. Roosevelt's longtime social secretary,
and another of her aides, Malvina Thompson.
("This type of investigation seems to me to smack
too much of the Gestapo methods," Eleanor
Roosevelt said at the time.)
Hoover later visited the comedian W.C. Fields,
who also despised Mrs. Roosevelt, and obtained
from him three miniature paintings of the First
Lady. "Viewed upside down they depicted, in
grossly exaggerated anatomical detail, a woman's
sex organs," writes Curt Gentry in his biography of
Hoover. They became a highlight of the FBI
director's private tour of his basement recreation
room.
Socialist Stalking
In 1986 a federal judge awarded $264,000 in
damages to the Socialist Workers Party to
compensate for 36 years of government
harassment. The FBI used wiretaps, bugs and
surreptitious entries to monitor and disrupt the
group from 1941 to 1976.
The FBI made at least 204 surreptitious entries of
SWP offices and photographed at least 9,864
documents. Agents also broke into the homes of
party members.
A 1966 FBI memo admitted: "We do not obtain
authorization for 'black bag' jobs from outside the
Bureau. Such a technique involves trespass and is
clearly illegal; therefore, it would be impossible to
obtain any legal sanction for it. Despite this, 'black
bag' jobs have been used because they represent
an invaluable technique in combatting subversive
activities aimed directly at undermining and
destroying our nation."
The court ruled, however, that the SWP was not
"subversive" but was instead a peaceful,
law-abiding organization -- that has the same right
to be nutty as any other group of Americans.
Meddling With The Press
It was an early spring day in 1969 when President
Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps of 13 government
officials and four journalists. His stated goal: to
learn who was leaking sensitive information and
embarassing the White House.
The taps never did uncover the source, and Nixon
complained that they produced "just gobs of
material: gossip and bull." But the material
collected about the personal lives of the targets
was priceless: social contacts, marital problems,
drinking habits, employment situations and even
sex lives. The agents collected political
information, too, especially about Nixon's
Democratic opponents. Even a Supreme Court
justice, who spoke to one of the wiretap victims
about a manuscript, was drawn into the net.
About 20 months later, just weeks before Hoover
was due to testify before a House committee, the
FBI ended the wiretaps. When Time magazine
learned of the story two years later and asked the
White House to comment, a spokesman denied
that any wiretaps were asked for or received. A
month later the new FBI director told the same
story to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In another case in 1969, John Ehrlichman ordered
a wiretap of newspaper columnist Joseph Kraft. A
security consultant for the Republican National
Committee installed the tap of Kraft's home. When
Kraft travelled overseas, the FBI asked local
authorities to wiretap his hotel room.
Supreme Court Snooping
The reach of law enforcement agents did not even
end at the august doors of the U.S. Supreme
Court. Not only did FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
influence which justices would be appointed, he
wiretapped them and spied on them once they
were in office.
The FBI admitted in 1988, in response to a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, that Justice
William O. Douglas had been the target of
numerous wiretaps. (When Justice Douglas in
June 1970 was discussing the impeachment of
another justice, Hoover sent H.R. Haldeman a
detailed report on the intercepted conversation.)
Agents also listened in on the conversations of
justices Earl Warren, Abe Fortas and Potter
Stewart.
"For years William O. Douglas had been writing,
in great secrecy he believed, the final volume of
his memoirs, dealing with his Court years," writes
Curt Gentry in his Hoover biography. "He was so
obsessed with preventing leaks that he made only
one copy of the manuscript. Sometime between
October 4 and November 12, 1968, the final draft
of his section on Lyndon Baines Johnson was
stolen from his office in the Supreme Court." After
finding he was unable to recreate the lost chapter,
Douglas never forgave Hoover.
The FBI's high court informants were well-placed.
They included the chief of the Supreme Court
police, Captain Philip H. Crook. The court's clerk,
Harold B. Willey, too, helped FBI agents "know
what action individual judges, or the court as a
whole, was taking," a bureau memorandum says.
Civil Rights Spying
The FBI's investigation of the NAACP began in
1941 and continued for at least 25 years. It
focused on chapters in cities across the nation,
but the FBI's New York field office was particularly
enthusiastic, sending to headquarters a 137-page
report in 1957 and dossiers on all the NAACP
board members and national officers in 1966.
Then there was the Army's nationwide domestic
surveillance program conducted in the late 1960s.
Its targets? "The civil rights movement" and the
"anti-Vietnam/anti-draft movements." The spooks
compiled dossiers on more than 100,000
Americans, including Joan Baez, Dr. Benjamin
Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Congressman
Abner Mikva and Senator Adlai Stevenson III.
Free speech rights were also trampled. In 1967, a
memo to all FBI field offices ordered agents to
counter what the government viewed as a "Black
Nationalist" threat. "Consideration should be given
to techniques to preclude" leaders of unapproved
groups "from spreading their philosophy publicly
through various mass communication media," the
memo said.
IRS Prying
When Gregory Millman published an article in the
September 1991 issue of Corporate Finance that
displeased the Internal Revenue Service, the
agency struck back.
Millman's article said the IRS had failed to collect
billions in taxes owed by large corporations like
General Motors. Who had leaked this information
to a reporter?
"Almost immediately, without informing Millman,
the IRS obtained from the telephone company a
list of all the numbers the reporter had dialed from
his phone. But then the IRS cast a much wider
net, requesting telephone companies all over the
country to provide it with the toll record of all the
telephone calls made by those persons whom
Millman had called," writes David Burnham in
"Above the Law."
[...]
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