As part of a recent CNN special called Black in America much new information came to light about the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., information that should stand as a stark warning of the dangers of allowing one branch of government to engage in surveillance of American citizens without oversight from another.
That is precisely what happened in the 60s under J. Edgar Hoover, who kept up a relentless and obsessive campaign to eavesdrop on King and use anything he found to discredit the civil rights leader, all in blatant violation of the 4th amendment prohibition on unlawful searches. The 4th amendment requires that all searches and surveillance on American citizens be undertaken only after showing probable cause and getting a warrant from a judge, yet the only person who authorized the bugging of King's home and the tapping of his phones was Robert Kennedy, attorney general at the time.
After King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech in Washington in August 1963, the FBI began to focus enormous institutional attention on him. One FBI memo from just after that speech declared King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country," while another called for a meeting of department heads to "explore how best to carry on our investigation [of King] to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the Bureau." Left unsaid is any legitimate reason why the FBI should be investigating King at all, a man clearly being surveilled solely because he advocated ideas the government didn't like.
One month after that famous speech, Kennedy approved a request from Hoover to allow the FBI to break into King's home and place recording devices. There doesn't appear to be any concern at all for the legality of the operation; Kennedy's only concern was for the "delicacy of this particular matter" and he wanted to make sure that the agents didn't get caught planting the bugs. The chief law enforcement officer in the nation, sworn to uphold the constitution, had given permission to the FBI to flagrantly break the law and violate the constitution by bugging the home of a man who had broken no laws whatsoever, a man who had done nothing but engage in perfectly legal protest against laws that are universally viewed with disgust today.
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We've already weakened the probable cause requirement, allowing the executive branch to issue National Security Letters that certify that a given request for surveillance is part of a national security investigation. And we now know that the FBI has abused that authority literally thousands of times over the last few years, according to a Department of Justice report. We've already set up a secret court to hear such warrant requests to insure that no sensitive information will be released, and we've already passed a law that makes it a crime for anyone who is under surveillance to be informed of that fact.
But even these already weakened safeguards are too much for the Bush administration. They insist that the president has the unilateral power to authorize the FBI, the CIA and the NSA to listen in on any phone conversation or intercept any email, even those to or from American citizens, without ever asking for a warrant even from the secret FISA court. No need to meet the probable cause standard, or any other standard, because no one outside of those agencies will ever know who is being surveilled or why. In short, they insist that they have the omnipotent authority claimed by J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s.
Could they be using that power to do what Hoover and Kennedy did, to dig up dirt on political opponents that can be used to keep them compliant? Does that sound paranoid to you? It shouldn't. Those who ignore history, remember, are doomed to repeat it, and this is a lesson we should have learned long ago. If we allow the government to operate with impunity, to ignore the safeguards set up to protect our liberty, we cannot be surprised when we find that liberty imperiled.
The entire aricle is very well written.
