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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Government spying will increase

Donald Trump’s presidency will trigger an unprecedented wave of political organizing, and citizens should be more concerned with government spying.

The United States has a well-documented history of crushing political dissent, and revisiting that history is needed now more than ever. Most are familiar with the legendary political activism of the 1960s. Images of thousands of anti-war protestors, Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers and Malcolm X have all morphed into popular symbols of the American ideal — our right to assemble, associate, speak and think freely. Many of these 1960s movements, however, failed.

In 1975 a Senate investigation called the Church Committee investigated U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI. Led by Sen. Frank Church, party state, the investigation unearthed the inner workings of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO’s most well-known operation was the targeting of Martin Luther King Jr. An entire case study in the Church Committee’s report is dedicated to documenting the massive campaign of surveillance and harassment carried out by the Bureau to “‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader.” Methods included attempts to break up King’s marriage, discredit him as a communist and the sending of letters encouraging him to commit suicide. Actions taken by the FBI against King have long fueled speculations that the Bureau played a role in his assassination, but the Church Committee could not verify these 
suspicions.

King’s experience was a small fraction of COINTELPRO’s scope. The bulk of the program focused on disrupting a variety of organizations active during the ‘60s, like the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the Communist Party of USA, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the New Left and the Nation of Islam. The FBI planted news stories, wiretapped phones, inappropriately audited people through the IRS and ruined reputations and 
careers.

The government wanted to turn black and white activists against one another. Fake letters were sent to black civil rights groups posing as white anti-war protesters that refer to “your handkerchief head mamma,” while other fake letters were sent to the Black Panthers that call out the “SDS and its honky intellectual approaches.”

When an anti-war group wanted to drop thousands of flowers over the Pentagon, an FBI agent infiltrated the group and “kept up the pretense right to the point at which the publisher showed up at the airport with 200 pounds of flowers, with no one to fly the plane.” The Bureau also tried to widen the rift between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

Trump’s potential abuse of the surveillance state to crush ideological opponents make Church’s words seem particularly ominous: “If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”

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