[Toshi]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A1999-2002Oct22&notFound=true

in the middle of an article about the writing and passage of the PATRIOT Act in the weeks immediately following 9/11 can be found this gem:

Underlying the discussion about how to respond to the terror attacks was the mid-1970s investigation, led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), into the government's sordid history of domestic spying. Through hundreds of interviews and the examination of tens of thousands of documents, the Church committee found that the FBI, CIA and other government agencies had engaged in pervasive surveillance of politicians, religious organizations, women's rights advocates, antiwar groups and civil liberties activists.

At FBI headquarters in Washington, for example, agents had developed more than half a million domestic intelligence files in the previous two decades. The CIA had secretly opened and photographed almost a quarter-million letters in the United States from 1953 to 1973.

One of the most egregious intelligence abuses was an FBI counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. It was, the Church report said, "designed to 'disrupt' groups and 'neutralize' individuals deemed to be threats to domestic security." Among other things, COINTELPRO operations included undermining the jobs of political activists, sending anonymous letters to "spouses of intelligence targets for the purposes of destroying their marriages," and a systematic campaign to undermine the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights efforts through leaked information about his personal life.

"Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies and too much information has been collected" through secret informants, wiretaps, bugs, surreptitious mail-opening and break-ins, the Church report warned.

 

[BurlyShirley]

With the exception of the MLK thing....cool!

 

[quadricolour]

Yep, COINTELPRO was a really nasty program.

A quote from Hoover on the necessity of tactics like these:

The forces which are most anxious to weaken our internal security are not always easy to identify. Communists have been trained in deceit and secretly work toward the day when they hope to replace our American way of life with a Communist dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged movements, such as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their sinister purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify, the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement of Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important to learn to know the enemies of the American way of life.

 

[fluff]

You begin to wonder who really needs the tin-foil hats, the conspiracy theorists or the government...

 

[Silver]

Goddamn communists, tricking us into letting black people into white bathrooms.

 

[Tenchiro]

Hey, if you weren't a pinko commie you had nothing to worry about. The subjugation of brown people is a great American tradition.

 

[fluff]

C'mon, clearly US citizens pose the biggest threat to the US of any nation. I say shoot yourselves now before someone else does.