Martin Luther King with the man who authorized spying on him. Image: Wikimedia
Today brings not only celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr, but also, on this particular Monday, a cautionary tale. The actions perpetrated against one of our nation's most important dissidents by his own government are a reminder of how bad things can get when there's insufficient oversight and too much power granted to a domestic spy program.
President Obama himself noted that Martin Luther King was targeted by the FBI and the NSA in his speech about reforms to the agency last Friday. “I have often reminded myself that I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Dr. King, who were spied on by their own government,” he said.
Somewhat perversely, he made the point amidst a prolonged oratory on the merits of upholding vast domestic spy powers, and offered little indication of what disturbing (and illegal) lengths the government once went to sabotage King within the surveillance apparatus. Obama suggested no serious reforms to the many-tentacled spying operation exposed by Edward Snowden, and no serious means of rerouting the trajectory towards such disgraceful anti-democratic lapses occurring again.
Now, Snowden's revelations remain contentious—most Americans think the notorious leaker should be charged with a crime, and that his actions have harmed national security. And I've had more than a few spirited debates with individuals who think the outrage to the NSA revelations is an overreaction, and that the agency's surveillance is justified.
I've been called paranoid for asserting that domestic spying programs are capable of eroding democracy, and for suggest that even if NSA-style mass data collection wasn't being used in abusive ways right now (which it just so happens it is), it opens the doors to a slippery slope that's led us to some truly ugly destinations in the not-too-distant past.
Back in the 1960s, the NSA directly spied on Martin Luther King, Jr, after all, and worked with the other spy agencies to help deter and discredit the civil rights icon.
According to documents that were only declassified last year, President Johnson, surprised by the success of the antiwar movement, called on the NSA to monitor a wide range of dissenting voices; activists, celebrities like Muhammed Ali, and even senators like Frank Church. The BBC reported that "the NSA worked with other spy agencies to draw up the watch lists' of anti-war critics, tapping their phone calls."
The so-called Minaret program continued into the Nixon administration, until 1973, when it was shut down in the wake of Watergate. Of course, the NSA's activities during the period, which scholars call "most likely illegal," have nothing on the abuses perpetrated by the FBI during the same period.
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI ran far more rampant, and perhaps even using data gleaned from NSA wiretaps, embarked on a campaign to harass and discredit King. Two days after the March on Washington, William Sullivan, head of the FBI's Division Five, wrote a memo:
Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulder over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security…[I]t may be unrealistic to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence that would stand up in testimony in court or before Congressional Committees that the Communist party, USA, does wield substantial influence over Negroes which one day could become decisive.
"We must mark him now. ... It may be unrealistic to limit ourselves... to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence."
That kind of language should send a shiver down your spine. That's the slippery slope, right there. A flip decision made to override the democratic process. The FBI would go on to make some 25 efforts to discredit and harass King, including threatening him with audio of his sexual liaisons and sending a repulsive letter addressed to him that recommended he kill himself.
On September 16, 1963, Internal Security Section chief Fred Baumgardner proposed a major expansion of the FBI's investigation against King
The capacity for abuse is being installed into the system now, precisely at a moment when Occupy protesters and environmentalists are being classified as terrorist threats by the FBI.
And the FBI could throw that switch for two main reasons—one, it had the vast surveillance infrastructure all set up that enabled such intrusive targeted spying to take place, and two, it was operating in the deepest of secrecy, without the fear of checks from the American public.
Now, the official line is that the NSA isn't collecting data on Americans specifically—it's just metadata, and it's indiscriminately collected, and the government can't read your emails. Most of this has been found to be false—at the very, very least, the government could at any point use your digital trail to whip up an enormously accurate portrait of you. So the infrastructure is there, no doubt about it, and it is exponentially more powerful and accurate than anything even dreamt of in Hoover's day.
As far as secrecy and legality, there is indeed a body—the FISA courts—that is intended to limit and curb modern-day NSA surveillance excesses and oversteps. But because it too operates in secrecy, there's no guarantee that it's working as it should, that dissidents aren't getting unduly monitored, or eventually, even harassed. Some say it works swimmingly, others call it a "rubber stamp" for government requests.
Yet Obama refused even to appoint a genuine public advocate that would have access to the court's dealings in his reforms. We must continue to subsist on government assurances that all is being carried out to the letter of law, even though the chief of those programs has already been caught lying, in public, directly to Congress's face about their nature.
None of this is to suggest that any of the atrocities carried out against King are being repeated today. But it is to suggest that Snowden's disclosures are hugely important. They act as a check on the complacency that's apt to fester when a spy program grows accustomed to working in unimpeachable secrecy.
It's to remind us that the massive surveillance apparatus erected in the wake of 9/11 has grow large and unwieldy, and is doing things that make most Americans uncomfortable. What's disturbing is that the capacity for abuse is being installed into the system now, precisely at a moment when dissidents like Occupy protesters and environmentalists are getting classified as terrorist threats by the FBI—the same agency that tried to coerce our nation's greatest civil rights hero into killing himself.
It's not paranoia, or partisan outrage. It's a genuine fear that our homespun spying policies could cripple the democratic process, in which robust dissent plays a crucial role. Martin Luther King never relented in the face of such intense government bullying. We should give our thanks that, in addition to his myriad other accomplishments, he called truth to power. And through his perseverance, he helped expose this domsetic spying discgrace.
With the excesses of Hoover's FBI in mind, we should reconsider Snowden now, for undertaking a major effort to help ensure that such egregious transgressions like those that targeted King don't happen again.