BOVARD

FFF Launches my Op-ed on Surveillance; early hate mail

10:53 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Surveillance

The Future of Freedom Foundation posted & sent out today my op-ed on how the current NSA wiretapping scandal paves the way to repeat police state atrocities of the 1960s.  Here are a couple paragraphs from the piece:

Many Americans have shrugged off the recent controversy over illegal wiretaps because they assume that the government would never be concerned with people like themselves. But the FBI continually expanded its enemies list. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston testified to Congress about COINTELPRO’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.�

Boundless federal spying on Americans fundamentally changes the relation of the government to the people. The FBI’s efforts struck fear not only in average Americans but also in the members of Congress, who were supposed to oversee and check the FBI’s uses of its power. The House majority leader, Hale Boggs, explained in 1971, “Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of action for men in public life can be compromised quite as effectively by the fear of surveillance as by the fact of surveillance.�

Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

XXXX

The op-ed is already generating  flack to FFF from newspapers. One angry reply warned: “HAve you already forgotten about 911. Be careful what you say, not Americans but non American that are threatening our country need to be kept up with.
And as far as I am concerned they can tap my phone because I am not doing anything illegal. Better for them to hear me ask about my Mother’s knee replacement and forget about me than to over look another plot to attack our country. It is time you bleeding hearts get real and look around and see the real threat to our country.”