The New York Times story about NYPD spying on those who might become protesters at the 2004 GOP Convention sparked a good discussion last night and this morning on EZWriter’s Diary, NYT: Vast, illegal spying targeted protesters. Here’s the Times piece with an excerpt:
City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention.
From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.
They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.
From these operations, run by the department’s "R.N.C. Intelligence Squad," the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.
But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped "N.Y.P.D. Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.
These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.
In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. [My emphasis]
Jim Dwyer, who wrote the original piece, has a new one up tonight:
City Asks Court Not to Unseal Police Spy Files.
Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will "fixate upon and sensationalize them," hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.
In papers filed in federal court last week, the city’s lawyers also say that the documents could be "misinterpreted" because they were not intended for the public.
"The documents were not written for consumption by the general public," wrote Peter Farrell, senior counsel in the city’s Law Department. "The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information."
Cough, cough.
Tempting as it might be to ask whether the Times has been sitting on this story for as long it kept the NSA domestic spying story out of public view, what’s more important is uncovering what else the NYPD, other police departments, the FBI and other agencies have been doing to crush dissent and dissidents besides window-peeping, high-tech and otherwise. Are they doing more than aggressively gathering "intelligence"? Distant and recent history tells us they probably are. The record of the Bush Administration – the fragments that have come to light – makes it a certainty.
Not almost a certainty. They’ve got the Patriot Act to help them and the continuing excuse of Nine Eleven to do what the likes of Dick Cheney wanted to do before al Qaeda was a gleam in Osama’s eye.
What exactly it is they’re doing can only be guessed at. We know what they did in the past. Infiltration. Provocation. Instigation. Disinformation. Assassination.
One of the centerpieces of the government’s programs for carrying this out was Cointelpro, Counter Intelligence Program, the FBI operation whose mission was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" activities of black nationalists, communists, the socialist and social democratic left, antiwar groups and, when they had time, the Ku Klux Klan.
The bureau began the operation in 1956, mostly to go after the Communist Party USA. But Cointelpro subsequently spread its disruptive, discrediting tentacles into Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights groups, including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was a leader in the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer as well as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which LBJ refused to back at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City (fearing walk-outs by all-white Southern delegations). He ordered J. Edgar Hoover to put it under surveillance. Considerable Cointelpro attention flowed toward the Socialist Workers Party, Black Panther Party, and two organizations I became a member of – Students for a Democratic Society and the American Indian Movement.
The program’s operatives sought – very often successfully – to infiltrate and provoke violence between members or whole factions within these organizations. They spread lies to an uncritical media about them, passed along fabricated rumors of love affairs between members, invented stories about financial improprieties with group funds and made claims that this person or that one was a police informant. They wrote letters anonymously to group leaders claiming that one faction was planning to purge another, or even murder its members.
These actions transformed friendships into rivalries and rivalries into suspicion and, in some cases, suspicion into lethal encounters. All the while, arrests on spurious charges drained resources and played with the minds of organizational leaders and the rank-and-file as well. In the pre-dawn hours of December 4, 1969, when Chicago police officers murdered Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, they were guided by the floor plan that FBI infiltrator William O’Neal had provided them.
Many of the same kinds of operations were directed at AIM, the repercussions of which are still being felt today in that splintered organization, with factions calling each other murderers. Although Cointelpro was officially ended before the Wounded Knee, S.D., occupation in 1973, its spirit lived on. FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs funds were used to set up a paramilitary squad called Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs) to crush AIM and intimidate its followers on the Pine Ridge reservation.
A burglary exposed Cointelpro in 1971 when two leftwing activists – many believe one of them was Abbie Hoffman – broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and walked away with files that they turned over to the press. Other information came to light five years later when the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate - also known as the Church Committee (named for Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho) - held Senate hearings.
Out of those hearings came rules that the FBI and CIA were supposed to follow in the future. Rules that some agents in both organizations and rightwingers have bellyached about ever since. Anybody who thinks those rules are followed believes too much of what’s found in those junior high civics textbooks, as is clear from this story.
At demonstrations shortly before the Iraq War started, my friends and I ran into a number of young protesters who asked us whether we thought the government was "spying on us." That would be always, we replied. Just assume it.
However, whether it's local, like the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division, or run out of some federal office with no nameplate on the door, the spying – even illegal forms of spying – aren’t what should be of primary concern. It’s what else they’re doing.