A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (17 page)

As journalist Barton Gellman noted in
The Washington Post
, "The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters–one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people–are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans."
²⁸⁴
It has since been revealed that the FBI issued more than 140,000 national security letters between 2003 and 2005, many involving people with no obvious connections to terrorism. Some of the FBI's clandestine surveillance on U.S. residents lasted for as long as eighteen months at a time without a search warrant, proper paperwork, or oversight.
²⁸⁵

Pursuing Peace Activists

In many cases, those targeted by the FBI are ordinary American citizens doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment right to free speech by criticizing the government or engaging in nonviolent, peaceful protest activities. As Michael German, a former FBI agent, observed, "You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find terrorism. Fortunately, there isn't a lot of terrorism in many communities. So they end up pursuing people who are critical of the government."
²⁸⁶

For example, on September 24, 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of five peace activists in the Minneapolis area. The agents filtered through all of the possessions in the activists' homes, seizing computers and cell phones, as well as other documents. An attorney for those targeted describes his clients–who include an activist-minded couple that sells silkscreened baby outfits and other clothes with phrases like "Help Wanted: Revolutionaries"–as "public non-violent activists with long, distinguished careers in public service, including teachers, union organizers and antiwar and community leaders."
²⁸⁷

The activists targeted in the Minneapolis raid had been members in the antiwar and labor communities for many years.
²⁸⁸
Other targets of bureau surveillance, according to the
New York Times
, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia, and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. "When such investigations produce no criminal charges," notes the
Times
, "their methods rarely come to light publicly"
²⁸⁹

One investigation that produced no charges but
did
come to light, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, focused on Scott Crow, a relatively obscure political activist who has been the object of intense surveillance by FBI counterterror-ism agents.

Scott Crow (Todd Sanchioni)

At a massive 440 pages, Crow's FBI file speaks volumes about the way in which the government views the American people as a whole–as potential threats to national security–not to mention what it says about the FBI's complete disregard for the Fourth Amendment. Over the course of at least three years, Crow had agents staking out his house; tracking the comings and goings of visitors; monitoring his phone calls, mail, and email; sifting through his trash; infiltrating his circle of friends; and even monitoring him round the clock with a video camera attached to a phone pole across the street from his house.
²⁹⁰

Given that no criminal charges were ever levied against Crow, it might appear that the agency went overboard in its efforts to monitor his activities. However, as we are discovering, such surveillance–even in the absence of credible evidence suggesting wrongdoing–is par for the course. For the federal government to go to such expense
(taxpayer
expense, that is) and trouble over a political activist, in particular, might seem rather paranoid. However, that is exactly what we are dealing with–a government that is increasingly paranoid about having its authority challenged and determined to discourage such challenges by inciting fear in the American people.

Make-Work Projects

The FBI has made a practice of singling out outspoken critics of the government for scrutiny (especially peace activists), attempting to assign them terrorist ties, and continuing the investigations long past the point at which they were found not guilty of having committed any crimes.

The question that must be asked is why. Why is the government expending so much energy on a relatively small group of peace and antiwar activists whose First Amendment activities comprise the totality of their "suspicious" behavior? Having acquired all of these new tools and powers post-9/11, of course the government wants to hold onto them and what better way to do so than by using them to ferret out "potential" threats.

This is what is described in government circles as a "make-work" project. A prime example of this occurred in 2002 when the FBI dispatched a special agent, armed with a camera, to a peace rally to search for terrorism suspects who might happen to be there, just to "see what they are doing."
²⁹¹
The protest was sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an organization dedicated to advocating peaceful solutions to international conflicts,
²⁹²
and was composed primarily of individuals distributing leaflets.
²⁹³
The Office of Inspector General, in its report on FBI surveillance of domestic organizations, characterized the task provided to the special agent assigned to the Merton protest as a "make-work" project.
²⁹⁴

Reversing the Burden of Proof

It gets worse. In late 2009 it was revealed that the FBI was granting its 14,000 agents expansive
additional
powers that include relaxing restrictions on a low-level category of investigations termed "assessments." This allows FBI agents, much like secret police, to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing individuals,
²⁹⁵
without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing.
²⁹⁶
(Incredibly, during the four-month period running from December 2008 to March 2009, the FBI initiated close to 12,000 assessments of individuals and organizations, and that was
before
the rules were further relaxed.)
²⁹⁷

These newest powers, detailed in the FBI's operations manual, extend the agency's reach into the lives of average Americans and effectively transform the citizenry into a nation of suspects, reversing the burden of proof so that we are now all guilty until proven innocent. Thus, no longer do agents need evidence of possible criminal or terrorist activity in order to launch an investigation. Now, they can "proactivefy" look into people and organizations, as well as searching law enforcement and private electronic databases without making a record about it, conducting lie detector tests, searching people's trash, and deploying surveillance teams.

The point, of course, is that if agents aren't required to maintain a paper trail documenting their activities, there can be no way to hold the government accountable for subsequent abuses. Moreover, as an FBI general counsel revealed, agents want to be able to use the information found in a subject's trash or elsewhere to pressure that person to assist in a government investigation.
²⁹⁸
Under the new guidelines, surveillance squads can also be deployed repeatedly to follow "targets," agents can infiltrate organizations for longer periods of time before certain undisclosed "rules" kick in, and public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars can be investigated without the need for extra supervision.

All of this was sanctioned by the Obama administration, which, as the
New York Times
aptly notes, "has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans' basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism" and now "seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did."
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In fact, this steady erosion of our rights started long before Bush came into office. Indeed, it has little to do with political affiliation and everything to do with an entrenched bureaucratic mindset–call it the "Establishment," if you like–that, in its quest to amass and retain power, seeks to function autonomously and independent of the Constitution.

The Law of the Instrument

What we are experiencing with the FBI is a phenomenon that philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument.
³⁰⁰
Or to put it another way: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Unfortunately, in the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we have all become the nails to the government's hammer. After all, having equipped government agents with an arsenal of tools, weapons, and powers with which to vanquish the so-called forces of terror, it was inevitable that that same arsenal would eventually be turned on the citizenry.

CHAPTER 14

Living in Oceania

"We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."
³⁰¹
,–CHIEF JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI,
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, (voicing his discontent with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling in
United States v. Pineda-Moreno
, which declared the warrantless use of a GPS device by police to be constitutional]

H
aving outstripped our ability as humans to control it, technology, while useful and beneficial at times, seems to be turning into our Frankenstein's monster. Delighted with technology's conveniences, its ability to make our lives easier by doing an endless array of tasks faster and more efficiently, we have given it free rein in our lives with little thought to the legal or moral ramifications of doing so. Thus, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the fact that technology now operates virtually autonomously according to its own invasive code. It respects no one's intimate moments or privacy and is impervious to the foibles of human beings and human relationships. And with the proliferation of the police as conjoined with the FBI and other intelligence agencies, everyone–whether innocent or not–is now a suspect, much like living in Orwell's Oceania where Big Brother watched everyone.

Technology, thus, while providing benefits, has negatives which most are willing to overlook. For example, consider how enthusiastically we welcomed Global Positioning System (GPS) devices into our lives. We've installed this satellite-based technology, which is funded and operated by none other than the U.S. Department of Defense,
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in everything from our phones to our cars to our pets. Yet by ensuring that we never get lost, never lose our loved ones, and never lose our wireless signals, we also made it possible for the government to never lose sight of us, as well. Indeed, while many Americans are literally lost without their cell phones and GPS devices, they have also become ubiquitous conveniences for law enforcement agencies, which use them to track our every move.

GPS Devices

In January 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 ruling
³⁰³
in
United States v. Jones
, declaring that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The ruling arose out of a September 2005 incident in which police, lacking a valid search warrant, placed a GPS device on the undercarriage of Antoine Jones' Jeep while it was parked in a public lot in Maryland. Jones, the co-owner of a nightclub in Washington, D.C., was suspected of being part of a cocaine-selling operation.

Every day–24 hours a day, seven days a week–for four weeks, the police used the GPS device to track Jones' movements and actions. Based upon the detailed information they were able to obtain about Jones' movements (including a trip to a Maryland stash house in which police reportedly found cocaine, crack, and $850,000 in cash), on October 24, 2005, police arrested and charged Jones with conspiring to distribute drugs. Jones was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.