Did you know that in the 1960s, the FBI was using its most advanced technologies
to spy on a dangerous American dissident named Martin Luther King?
Under the surveillance program COINTELPRO, the NSA and FBI spied extensively on King.
Why?
Because he spoke out often against the ongoing Vietnam War and
was subversive in his fight for racial equality.
The FBI used information they had on King to try to blackmail him and
even suggested that he kill himself.
Today, the debate about surveillance is raging again.
With the Snowden leaks about the NSA in 2013 and
the even more recent public fight over encryption, between Apple and the FBI.
But mass government surveillance of its own citizens is nothing new.
In the US, it goes back over 100 years.
And perhaps it shouldn't be shocking,
government surveillance of citizens is actually an entirely
predictable consequence of having an interventionist foreign policy.
Because the programs and techniques used to spy on foreign
population tend to find their way back home.
The first major government spying program occurred under the US Philippine War,
under the father of US military intelligence Captain Ralph Van Deman.
He oversaw efforts collecting communications to monitor and
suppress Filipinos who posed a threat to the war effort.
Rebels, critics, and other subversives.
They collected information like physical appearance, finances, friends, family and
political beliefs.
After the war,
Van Deman pushed his superiors to create a permanent military intelligence effort.
Eventually, he succeeded and
was placed in charge of the newly created Military Intelligence Division or MID.
But after World War I,
it was revealed that the MID hadn't limited surveillance to foreign targets.
It had collected millions of pages of communications from Americans
of German descent.
This resulted in a political backlash,
with many promises to limit surveillance on American citizens in the future.
Surveillance programs were expanded further during World War II,
and the post war period saw the creation of the National Security Agency.
Surveillance is becoming a permanent government mission
rather than a temporary war mission, and
the NSA began to be staffed by civilian employees instead of the military.
This meant there was the opportunity to find new targets.
By the time of the Vietnam War,
the NSA was regularly collecting information on private citizens,
including activist, critics of the war and others they considered subversive.
Which could describe nearly anyone who was critical of the government.
They would share the information with other branches of government,
like the FBI, the CIA, and the military.
The abuses of COINTELPRO, the program used against Martin Luther King,
were revealed in 1974, leading again to public outrage.
A Senate investigation called The Church Committee Created a special court
to constrain future surveillance programs.
In theory,
it would ensure all surveillance adhered to constitutional limits.
These constraints were put to the test after the 911 attacks,
when government surveillance programs expanded dramatically.
Since then multiple NSA employees have come forward, saying that the agency
regularly violates constitutional rights and has few legal constraints.
But these whistleblowers received little public attention in part,
because their word against the government.
And then came Edward Snowden, he presented evidence showing that the NSA
was storing all kinds of information thought to be private, texts, phone calls,
phone locations, emails, Facebook messages, every conceivable bit of data.
By leaking millions of documents to the press, his claims were undeniable.
Now there was proof of how massive and invasive the NSA's programs had become.
He also showed that the special court created by the church committee,
does nothing to constrain abuse.
The court seemingly acts as a rubber stamp,
okaying everything the NSA wants to do.
Examining the history of US surveillance programs shows us why we should be
skeptical when the government tells us it must intrude our constitutional privacy
because of foreign threats.
As we've seen, when government surveillance goes unchecked,
US citizens become the target.