Surveillance State:
Government Snooping, Prying, and Informing Worse Than You Think
Tainted character, ruined trust and the disruption of democratic
politics are the great achievements of state surveillance.
October 3, 2010
By Stephan Salisbury
The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a
stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where
Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper's bullet.
It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of
absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What now?
That image is, of course, a photograph taken by Ernest C. Withers,
Memphis born and bred, and known as the photographer of the civil
rights movement. He was there at the Lorraine Motel, as he had been
at so many other critical places, recording iconic images of those
tumultuous years.
In addition to photographing moments large and small in the struggle
for black civil rights in the South, Withers had another job. He was
an informer for the FBI, passing along information on the doings of
King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Ben Hooks, and other leaders of
the movement. He reported on meetings he attended as a photographer,
welcomed in by those he knew so intimately. He passed along photos of
events and gatherings to his handler, Special Agent William H.
Lawrence of the FBI's Memphis office. He named names and sketched out plans.
In an exhaustive recent report, the Memphis Commercial Appeal
detailed Withers's undercover activities, provoking a pained and
complex response from the many who knew him and were involved in the
civil rights movement. His family simply refuses to believe that the
paper's report could be accurate. On the other hand, Andrew Young,
with King during those last moments, accepts Withers's career as an
informant, saying it just doesn't bother him. Civil rights leaders,
including King, viewed Withers as crucial to the movement's struggle
to portray itself accurately in Jet, Ebony, and other black journals.
In that Withers was successful -- and the rest, Young suggests,
doesn't matter. Besides, he told the Commercial Appeal, they had
nothing to hide. "I don't think Dr. King would have minded him
making a little money on the side."
Activist and comedian Dick Gregory, hearing Young's comments, turned
on his old comrade. "We are talking about a guy hired by the FBI to
destroy us and the fact that Andy could say that means there must be
a deep hatred down inside of him," he said. "If he feels that way
about King only God knows what he feels about the rest of us."
This is the way it is with informers, so useful to reckless law
enforcement authorities and employed by the tens of thousands as the
secret shock troops of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Surveillance has
multiple uses, not the least of which is to sow mistrust, which in
turn eats at the cohesion of families, social and political
movements, and ultimately the fabric of community itself.
D'Army Bailey, a former Memphis judge and target of FBI surveillance
in the 1960s, told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the use of
informers in everyday life ruptured fundamental civic bonds,
fomenting deep suspicion and mistrust. "It's something you would
expect in the most ruthless totalitarian regimes. Once that trust is
shattered that doesn't go away."
Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter and now a professor
of journalism at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and
Communications at Hampton University, pointed out that the black
community in the South in the 1960s granted a special trust to black
journalists. Indeed, some of those journalists took out an ad in
black newspapers in February 1970 pledging not to spy or inform or
betray that trust.
"If all that we've been told through these documents that have been
released, if that's true, then it puts a... very, very, very heavy,
heavy mark not just on [Withers] and his work but on the trust that
the black journalists made many years ago with the black community,"
Caldwell said.
Keeping Tabs on Americans for Fun and Profit
That was then, this is now. The Withers story is, of course, ancient
history, shocking to many, yes, even though it is well known that FBI
and police informers permeated the movement in general and King's
circle in particular, and illegal wiretaps and bugs snared even the
most private conversations of civil rights leaders. But few who
thought or wrote about the Withers news found it an especially
relevant tale for our present moment. How wrong they were.
If, amid anti-communist hysterias and social upheaval decades ago,
the U.S. government employed armies of informers and other forms of
often illegal surveillance, government and law enforcement agencies
today are actually casting a far broader surveillance net in the name
of security in a relentless effort to watch and hear everything --
and to far less attention or concern than in the 1960s.
In fact, a controversy in Pennsylvania has just erupted over secret
state surveillance of legitimate political groups engaged in
meetings, protests, and debates involving subjects of public
importance -- natural gas drilling, abortion, military policy, animal
mistreatment, gay rights. Such controversies over domestic political
spying have surfaced remarkably regularly since September 11, 2001 --
police and FBI informers in mosques, Defense Department surveillance
of antiwar groups and even gay organizations, National Security
Agency illegal wiretapping, and surveillance of groups planning
protests for the political conventions of the major parties.
Revelations of such activities have become almost white noise. All
were covered in the media, but cumulatively it's as though none of
them ever happened.
The Pennsylvania surveillance case, which is just the latest of these
glimpses into the secret surveillance world of our ever more powerful
national security state, does not directly involve informers (as far
as we know). It marks a different point on what FBI Director Robert
Mueller has referred to as the "continuum" -- the whole environment
of daily life, really, which in the post-9/11 world has been
appropriated by law enforcement officials in the name of "terrorism
prevention."
"There is a continuum between those who would express dissent and
those who would do a terrorist act," Mueller said ominously in a 2002
speech. "Somewhere along that continuum we have to begin to
investigate. If we do not, we are not doing our job. It is difficult
for us to find a path between the two extremes."
What does that mean? Just last week, FBI agents raided half a dozen
homes of anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago, carting away
papers, computers, clothing, and other personal effects, all in the
name of investigating "material support of terrorism." The activists,
their supporters, and their attorneys have a different view: they see
the raids as designed to intimidate and disrupt legitimate political
dissent -- points on "the continuum." It is a virtual certainty that
evidence of intrusive surveillance will surface as these cases mature.
In Pennsylvania the continuum has meant, most recently, that the
state Office of Homeland Security contracted with a small outfit, the
Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, run by a couple of
ex-cops, one from York, Pennsylvania, the other raised in
Philadelphia and a veteran of Israeli law enforcement. For the past
year, the institute has been providing secret intelligence reports
via the state Homeland Security Office to Pennsylvania police
departments and private companies in order, the reports say, to
"support public and private sector, critical infrastructure
protection initiatives and strategies."
Many of these reports focused on groups opposed to Marcellus Shale
drilling, which you may not have known was a breeding ground for
terrorism. In fact, you may not even know what it is. But
particularly in Pennsylvania and New York, Marcellus Shale means big
bucks. The shale is part of a 600-mile-long geological formation
containing a huge reservoir of natural gas. Energy companies are
seeking to exploit that formation in ways that have raised serious
and widespread environmental concerns. Ed Rendell, governor of
Pennsylvania, facing severe budget problems, wants to impose a tax on
the eager drillers. With Marcellus Shale, there's something for
everybody -- except for environmentalists concerned about the impact
of drilling on the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the Delaware River basin.
Opposition from various environmental groups, then, has threatened to
spoil the party. What a surprise to find many of those groups
mentioned in one "counterterrorism" report after another. For
instance, a report on an "anti-gas" training session in Ithaca, New
York, noted that the group conducting the training (part of a radical
environmental network) was nonviolent, but should be considered
dangerous anyway.
"Training provided by the Ruckus Group does not include violent
tactics such as the use of IEDs [roadside bombs] or small arms," a
2009 institute report assured its no-doubt-relieved readers. "The
Ruckus Group does, however, provide expertise in planning and
conducting demonstrations and campaigns that can close down a
facility and embarrass a company." To spell it out: this
counterterrorist monitoring institute was providing public-relations
alerts for private energy companies at tax-payer expense.
For nearly a decade, 9/11 has been used to justify this kind of
"intelligence" provided to corporate and private interests. Such
information may have nothing to do with terrorism, but it serves
nicely to illustrate how the protection of private profit has trumped
concern for real public security. What was missed as institute
"analysts" pondered potential Ruckus Group embarrassments to energy companies?
Rendell, who claimed shock and embarrassment when the reports became
public this month, has now canceled the institute's $103,000 state
contract. He also insisted that he knew nothing about the contract,
and reaffirmed the right of peaceful protest in the United States.
Not so fast. My colleague at the Philadelphia Inquirer Dan Rubin
first reported the institute's questionable focus on July 19th. At
that time, the state director of homeland security, James Powers,
defended the institute's work, citing intelligence warnings about
protests at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last year. "Powers said
that Institute analysts posed in chat rooms as sympathizers of the
Pittsburgh Organizing Group, which opposed the summit, and learned
where the group would be mobilizing," Rubin wrote. '"We got the
information to the Pittsburgh police,' he said, 'and they were able
to cut them off at the pass."'
How could Rendell not know about this? Among the many unanswered
questions to date: Who received these reports and for what purpose?
The state has declined so far to disclose a list of the recipients.
But in an email that Powers inadvertently sent to an anti-drilling
group, he all but admits that the intelligence operation, at least in
part, served corporate drilling interests.
"We want to continue providing this [intelligence] support to the
Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding
those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies," Powers
wrote. (He resigned at the beginning of October amid on-going
criticism over the institute's reports.)
The Institute of Terrorism Response and Research was not alone in
monitoring the Pittsburgh G-20 summit, of course. The Pennsylvania
State Police also kept tabs on those potential demonstrators,
funneling information gathered into the state "fusion center," its
surveillance and intelligence data hub.
Fusion centers are largely products of the war on terror, a result of
the massive waves of federal "security" counterterrorism funding that
flowed nationwide in the wake of 9/11. More than 70 such centers now
exist around the country, serving to gather "intelligence" from
private and law-enforcement sources and state and federal agencies.
This information is stored for future use as well as distributed to
local police, state police, private corporations, and various public agencies.
In the case of the Pittsburgh G-20 summit surveillance,
Pennsylvania's fusion center passed its information on protests and
protest groups along to other local and federal law enforcement
agencies, intelligence agencies, and the U.S. military. (An instance
of this probably resulted in the arrest of Elliott Madison, a
self-described anarchist who was supposedly distributing information
to demonstrators via Twitter, an activity applauded by U.S.
authorities when utilized by Iranian dissidents, but apparently
frowned upon when employed stateside.)
The specter of bombs, vandalism, disruption, violence, and anarchy
infused these reports and hundreds of arrests were made during
largely peaceful protests. Civil rights suits have, not surprisingly,
followed in the aftermath of the summit.
Names, Names, and More Names
Here is the continuum at work. A group is singled out by an
intelligence report -- a Quaker "cell" opposed to the wars in the
Middle East, for instance, or opponents of Marcellus Shale drilling,
or those who disagree with G-20 policies. Once the group is
identified, federal agencies and state and local police move to
insert informers in it and/or aggressively investigate it. Such
surveillance, whether done by informers or by agents picking through
trash bags, generates names. Names go into databases and are
networked nationwide. Databases grow.
Michael Perelman, one of the principals in the Institute of Terrorism
Response and Research, defended his group's work by arguing that even
peaceful protests have security implications and that the institute
did not track individuals. This is disingenuous. The institute and
the state fusion center, officially known as the Pennsylvania
Criminal Intelligence Center, may work in parallel worlds, but their
methods mirror each other. The state fusion center, run by the state
police, provides access to law enforcement nationwide. Names of
groups and members of groups are its stock in trade, the meat of all
surveillance. In the same way, the state Homeland Security Office
distributed the institute's reports to hundreds of agencies and
private companies.
The tracking of legitimate political groups and people engaged in
lawful political activity is, of course, a fundamental corruption of
American democracy. Consider what happened in Oakland at the onset of
the Iraq war. A peaceful protest at the Oakland port was met by
police who opened fire on fleeing demonstrators and bystanders alike,
shooting wooden bullets and tear gas canisters. In my book, Mohamed's
Ghosts, I report that police had been alerted to potential violence
by the California Anti-Terrorism Training Center, a state fusion
center tracking political groups -- exactly the same thing done by
the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research. About 60 people
were injured, including 11 longshoremen, and 25 protestors were
arrested. This event was justified by the fusion center's spokesman
who claimed that a protest of a war waged against "international
terrorism" is itself "a terrorist act."
But the story didn't end there. A month after the initial 2003
protest, demonstrators, led by Direct Action to Stop the War among
other groups, held another Oakland protest to denounce the earlier
police violence. Leaders of that protest, it turned out, were
undercover Oakland police operatives who directed the protest's
planning. Deputy Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan shrugged it all
off, saying it was important for his department "to gather the
information and maybe even direct [protestors] to do something that
we wanted them to do."
The identification of dissident political groups, the gathering of
names, the manipulation of actual acts -- these are the overt
purposes of surveillance and informing. In reality, the goal of all
this furtive, fervent activity is not to dismantle terrorist networks
but to disrupt legitimate civic and political activity -- and
especially, in the post-9/11 world, to identify and infiltrate U.S.
Muslim and Middle Eastern congregations, civic groups, neighborhoods,
and activist organizations.
Toward that end, the FBI has moved to beef up its ranks of informers.
In its 2008 budget, the bureau sought more than $13 million simply to
vet and track more than 15,000 working informants, and noted that new
informants are signing up every day. Information provided by those
informants and by other increasingly ubiquitous and sophisticated
surveillance techniques is now funneled to fusion centers -- making
it all just a mouse-click away from public and private agencies nationwide.
In the 1960s, when Ernest Withers was an informant, such
computer-driven intelligence storage and distribution was only a
gleam in J. Edgar Hoover's eye. Nevertheless, in Memphis, where
Withers did the bulk of his work, information he passed along helped
dismantle the Invaders, a radical group that saw 34 members arrested.
Withers also gave government handlers photographs of religious
leaders, political activists, and labor organizers, shadow portraits
for shadow profiles in the FBI's burgeoning files. These were used by
law enforcement authorities in efforts to control the 1968 sanitation
workers' strike that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis.
Withers's image of striking Memphis sanitation workers holding aloft
an unbroken sea of signs reading "I Am A Man" remains as vivid today
as it was half a century ago. That a photographer who documented the
segregated South so powerfully labored as a police informer may seem
an unnerving contradiction. But Ronald Reagan also served as an FBI
informer. So did the ACLU's famed First Amendment lawyer, Morris
Ernst. Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission, funneled
information about the Kennedy assassination directly to J. Edgar
Hoover as well.
Informers have multiple, often conflicting motives, and Withers, who
died in 2007, is not around to explain or defend himself. The report
on his activities during the civil rights movement, his betrayals of
the movement's most prominent leaders, and his hand in destroying
local activist groups, however, is a powerful reminder of the long
history of political surveillance in this country and the corruptions
and animus it breeds. Whether it is the FBI's use of informers within
the civil rights movement or the state of Pennsylvania's monitoring
of legitimate dissent in the post-9/11 world, the ultimate victim of
such activity is American civil society itself.
The tainting of character, the undermining of basic trust, the
disruption of democratic politics -- these are the great achievements
of state surveillance. Thanks to 9/11 and truckloads of homeland
security money, the stain of those achievements is now flowing as
swiftly and freely as streams of data on a vast fiber optic network.
--
[Note on sources: Analysis of the use of surveillance and fusion
centers at G-20 summits in Pittsburgh and elsewhere may be found in
.pdf file format
here. http://www.rutherford.org/pdf/2010/Rise-of-the-American-Police-State.pdf
Alarmist police reports disseminated on G-20 threats in Pittsburgh
can be found in .pdf file format
here.
http://friendsoftortuga.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/aff_of_prob_cause.pdf
The 2008 FBI budget document can be seen in .pdf file format here.
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fbi/2008just.pdf
The Justice Department's Inspector General has just issued a report
examining the propriety of FBI investigation and surveillance of
domestic political activity; the report, well worth reading, can be
found, also in .pdf file format, here.]
http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s1009r.pdf
.
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