June 2013

Beverly Gage at Slate looks at the history of overreach and speech suppression in the intelligence community. “Since last week’s revelations about the NSA, skeptics have questioned whether expansive intelligence powers might really lead to civil liberties abuses,” Gage writes. “From a historical perspective, there’s no need to ask: Such abuses have occurred many, many times.”

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI stands as the example par excellence—an extreme but not fundamentally exceptional case of intelligence gathering gone awry. Last week I wrote a bit about COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious program of surveillance and disruption against targets ranging from Students for a Democratic Society to the Ku Klux Klan. But there’s another side to the FBI’s history of abuses—one that has less to do with attacks on political “subversives” than with the agency’s response to its mainstream critics.

Under Hoover the FBI devoted enormous resources to investigating people who publicly criticized intelligence operations or sought to challenge the powers of the FBI. Hoover’s targets extended from high-ranking members of the media and Congress down to ordinary citizens shooting the breeze. On one occasion, for instance, agents showed up to interview a Brooklyn liquor importer who had made the mistake of repeating a rumor that the FBI director might be “queer.” After a few minutes with the agents, who reminded him that Hoover’s “personal conduct is beyond reproach,” the man assured them that he held “no malice toward Mr. Hoover; that as a matter of fact he thinks Mr. Hoover has done a wonderful job.”

Can we trust the government with our secrets? No. – Slate Magazine

June 11, 2013