What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html

by rooster8 • 12 years ago

420 177 12 years ago

wyager• 12 years ago

Let this serve as a demonstration that government agencies actually can be comically evil.

A lot of people dismiss accusations against government agencies or fail to consider hypothetical legal abuse scenarios because "the government would never do that". Yes, the government would ever do that.

mathattack2• 12 years ago

It's stronger than the government would do that. It's that the government did that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.

Scuds• 12 years ago

In J. Edgar Hoover's mind

Civil Rights Movement -> Destabilizing Effect on American Culture -> Probably a Communist Plot -> Civil Rights Movement is the Enemy

scintill762• 12 years ago

I was going to make an "academic"-type counter-argument that not even terrorism fears approach the anti-communist hysteria that probably drove this incident, thus it won't happen again... but then there's the NYPD mosque spying case. It's not the same active blackmailing situation. But I think we can say the fact that it happened at all in "our enlightened day and age" is sufficient evidence that, if there were a few person(s) to discredit in order to tear down movements that the government didn't like or feared, they wouldn't mind trampling civil liberties to get it done.

Are there recent, well-documented cases of government blackmailing like this?

philwelch• 12 years ago

King was "one of the world's great civil rights heroes" because he was a subversive figure. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that subversive figures end up encountering resistance from the Establishment.

If you want an example of what the government would do and what the FBI did do, don't look at Martin Luther King. Look at Fred Hampton.

opendais7• 12 years ago

Tbh, this is what scares me about tech illiterate juries. Many of these cases hang on key pieces of evidence that are literally the FBI's word against the defendants.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

Good thing these things come up to make the FBI's word worth less, then!

We need some sort of standardised trust metric....

opendais7• 12 years ago

I'd prefer a better educated populace that realizes the "technical evidence" being submitted in many cases is essentially witness testimony and not physical evidence [e.g. fingerprints on the murder weapon] which I think many people believe.

Witness testimony is perfectly fine as long as it isn't implied to be anything greater than that.

spopejoy2• 12 years ago

Why would a tech-savvy jury be more inclined to discount testimony or non-technical evidence from the prosecution? It seems that the word of law enforcement has an advantage in the courtroom regardless of someone's literacy in any field.

In any case, I think a bigger problem isn't juries, but the huge amount of cases that never see a jury, via absurd overcharges leading to plea bargains. Only a judge is involved, and judges are much more "reliable" than a jury ...

Besides, when would an incident like this ever get in front of a jury? I can't think of a single case where the FBI was in the dock for COINTELPRO shenanigans like this.

opendais7• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov would be an example of what I mean. :P

samirmenon• 12 years ago

The New York Times actually broke the story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...

herbig• 12 years ago

The first words of the EFF article are "The New York Times". This article, as the title suggests, goes more into the "dangers of unchecked surveillance" in a digital age.

Mithrandir• 12 years ago

Here's the letter: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...

Curmudgel• 12 years ago

If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says:

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significant.

which the EFF quoted as

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significance).

dang3• 12 years ago

Yes. We changed the url to that from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr... as the "original" source.

rooster84• 12 years ago

I understand that it's policy to change the URLs to the original source, but in this case I feel the EFF article was a better discussion piece.

alukima• 12 years ago

I spent an obsessive night searching through documents via online 'reading rooms'. I don't have the links anymore but theres mounds of documentation showing intelligence agencies doing shady shit like this to try to break up civil rights groups. Fun look ups are 'blank panthers', 'san francisco', 'socialist', any black leader.

San Francisco seems like a broad term but there's so much interesting stuff, they were watching school teachers in the 60s and 70s and trying to create distrust within communities that were too left leaning.

http://vault.fbi.gov/search http://www.foia.cia.gov/

Estragon2• 12 years ago

The word to search for is COINTELPRO. Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI goes into some detail about it, and its notes probably provide pointers to the relevant documents.

ep103• 12 years ago

they still do this. Occupy was absolutely insane on this level, and we were small fish comparatively.

scintill762• 12 years ago

The unredacted version is really interesting historically, but I don't think it reveals much more about the lengths the FBI went to. I believe it was already well-known and believed that King was being sexually blackmailed specifically. The redacted portions all seem to deal with that exact nature of the blackmailing.

The redaction reveals more about what the FBI wouldn't do: how at least one person was reluctant to release public documentation proving that's what the FBI did.

neue• 12 years ago

When was the letter written? What marked the significance of '34 days later'?

Hovertruck• 12 years ago

I think the NYT article implied that it was 34 days until the ceremony where he was awarded the Peace Prize.

mynameishere• 12 years ago

Eventually we'll know what's in his file:

The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historic...

...some people think he made extensive use of prostitutes, but I expect the FBI would have pulled an "Eliot Spitzer" on him had that been the case. Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

It's likely that people still alive are also recorded on the tapes. Whatever else it does, the court order also protects their privacy.

KerrickStaley• 12 years ago

What Dr. King did or did not do isn't the point: the point is that the FBI abused its power (in a drastic fashion) in an attempt to suppress and damage King's political speech.

bilbo0s• 12 years ago

"... Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image..."

It's interesting... but why would it matter ???

Isn't the issue that Americans endure INVASION of private time... not necessarily how Americans USE their private time ???

Serious question. Just wondering if there is some legal justification for invading privacy to find out ... say ... what a political enemy is doing ??? I don't think they're supposed to do that ... but I'm not a lawyer.

12423gsd• 12 years ago

While he was not a communist, his plans for social justice were very threatening to the establishment

If you read "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (which he wrote towards the end of his life), he basically says that the Civil Rights movement needs to shift from racial agenda to an agenda of helping the poor. However he never presents an actual plan other than some vague idea of a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign

I'd go farther to argue that he's not a communist b/c he wasn't really thinking in those terms and he actively tried to avoid the label (that's why he took for ever to stand up against the war in Vietnam)

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they have done, and are still doing...

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

That's actually the best hope for America, the expectation that we should do good, do the best we can.

comice• 12 years ago

I don't see how perpetuating the myth helps with achieving that.

bduerst• 12 years ago

Maybe for some cases, but good is relative, subjective term. Good for whom?

Did the FBI agents drafting this think they were doing their best to do good?

rooster84• 12 years ago

Any system as large and complicated as this one will have failures. Our job is to learn from the past and try to prevent it from happening again in the future.

jafaku4• 12 years ago

Even if you had a perfect corruption-proof government design... What can you do about it? You are not in charge, and have no way to influence the people in charge.

AnimalMuppet9• 12 years ago

That's engineering for you. Examine the failure modes, and try to design the next system so it can't fail in any of the known ways.

In fact, that's what the authors of the Constitution were trying to do...

nraynaud3• 12 years ago

Yeah, failures that cost hundreds of thousands lives. We're talking about the most weaponized country in the world, and one of the least shy to use its weapons.

We are not talking about a movie maker delivering a boring scene who will try to do better in the next movie. We're talking about toppling foreign governments, invading countries, backing or installing dictatures, assassinating people, droning teenagers, dealing cocaine, torturing people, launching nuclear weapons. Doing it times and times over, never being shy about it, and never admitting any wrong.

There is zero structure of improvement in the US government behavior. Those structure exists, for example the Geneva treaty, the Rome treaty which brings trial for war criminals, but the US government refuses any accountability. There is no downside to the erratic US behavior.

Torgo• 12 years ago

Democracies don't have memory, they only have momentum.

glitchdout• 12 years ago

Our job is to learn from the past and try to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Doesn't seem to be working with Guantanamo. Or invading other countries.

res0nat0r• 12 years ago

The American government is not a single entity, it is comprised of many people both good and bad.

jafaku4• 12 years ago

And with the magic of compartmentalization, both kinds of people can work together to create a horrible organization that does all kinds of evil around the world.

waterlesscloud2• 12 years ago

As compared to exactly which other government? Anywhere?

jafaku4• 12 years ago

"Others do it therefore it's ok."

njharman2• 12 years ago

Comparisons are a Red Herring.

The point is people erroneously "believe" in their government. That it does only the most necessarily evil and then only to bad people. Such beliefs are manifestly dangerous. They result in things such as Drug seizure laws, PATRIOT act, militarization of police, demonizaton of whistle blowers.

DON'T trust authority, DON'T give authority powers assuming they will only be used for good, DO assume authority is lying, cheating, and evil.

etherael3• 12 years ago

Maybe the problem is not just the United States government, but the very idea of government and the modern nation state as it stands ever since it came into existence after the peace of westphalia?

Smother_Teresa• 12 years ago

It amazes me that people still paint an entire population with one brush.

thisjepisje2• 12 years ago

I find it funny how people feel offended as soon as you leave out the words "some" or "most".

jobu• 12 years ago

"Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill

dllthomas8• 12 years ago

I don't think the parent's point was that democracy is failing to do good, but that America is failing to do democracy.

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

That's a very cute quote, but "democracy" in of itself is vague. Direct democracy is certainly not better than other forms of government that have been tried. Indeed, direct democracies are nearly non-existent. Most countries are constitutional republics, or more euphemistically "representative democracies".

That said, the United States' implementation of a constitutional republic is still worse than other forms that have been tried. It has a majoritarian voting system, an electoral college and is heavily vulnerable to gerrymandering and divide/conquer.

Furthermore, the United States usually gets more stern criticism precisely because of the idiotic lie of American exceptionalism. The United States is the only country I know of that obsesses over how supposedly "free" it is with an almost religious fervor. All of this propaganda only makes the inevitable examples of U.S. government corruption even more bitter than they would have been if only Americans had a far more realistic outlook about themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

soperj• 12 years ago

USA should try democracy then instead of being a republic.

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

Part of the myth is that the US is actually democratic. A democracy is supposed to be 'rule of the people', as opposed to aristocracy, 'rule of the elite'.

What you have in the US is a system where politicians are all either elites in society, or vetted by elites. Where they manage to convince or coerce a 'big enough' group of people to vote for them (ie. half or just over half of voters that actually turn out, which is a subset of the population). Once they're in power, they don't rule on behalf of the people, they rule on behalf of the elites that funded their campaigns. They toe the party line, and within each party is a group of elite 'thinkers' - none of whom are elected, but nevertheless direct the party.

Democracies are also supposed to represent minorities and the 'common folk'. 'Rule of the people' implies a need to either involve the people directly, or rule on their behalf, yet in the US there is a decided animosity towards the people.

In your most recent elections, 36.6% of voters turned out. Once you tally the possible margins of victory, this means that it's possible that you are now ruled by politicians that less than 20% of eligible voters actually voted for. And I wonder what percentage of the population takes part in party primaries? How representative is the US' democracy?

pessimizer• 12 years ago

It's a common quote, but there's no argument contained within it other than an argument by Churchill's authority.

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill

eyeareque• 12 years ago

In US schools we are taught from a young age about our "democracy" that we have here. By the time we realize it is all a big lie, we're much older. If only we were able to teach our youngsters what really happens in politics in school.

grecy• 12 years ago

By the time we realize it is all a big lie, we're much older

And so far in debt and worry about healthcare you never again get a change to have your head above water and have a look around.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

What's the alternative, to just throw up our hands and sob into tea?

What you call a myth, we call an ideal. Are we living up to it right now? No. That doesn't mean we should discard it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

daveloyall• 12 years ago

Is there any indication that the modern FBI et al would use a strategy like this?

OMG STOP THE PRESSES I figured out the men's rights thing!

johnny99• 12 years ago

Snopes has a good explainer largely debunking one of the nastier pieces of misinformation circulating about MLK, which touches on FBI surveillance of him:

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp

codezero• 12 years ago

Wow the redacted parts read like modern day news article comment sections. I wonder, was it meant to look like it was sent from a crazy person, but to include specific facts to scare MLK, or is this aligned with the typical kinds of personality attacks done by people at the time?

josho• 12 years ago

This puts in context why privacy is so important. If for some reason you were to become a leader of a movement and the NSA had swept up every digital bit about you for the last 30 years then they could potentially have a goldmine of information to soil your name and put the movement into disarray.

dangayle• 12 years ago

How hard would it be to create a fake internet paper trail containing pornography, chat rooms, etc., as is mentioned in the article? It seems that would be relatively trivial for a sufficiently motivated state actor to perpetrate.

baxterross• 12 years ago

The government does more harm than good

AnimalMuppet9• 12 years ago

For all the harm that government does, anarchy is almost always worse.

none_for_me_thx2• 12 years ago

Anarchy => no rulers

not

Anarchy => no rules

yarou• 12 years ago

Hmm, humans being governed by an inhuman system is worse than humans being governed by other humans?

comrade16• 12 years ago

This was in the 1960s. Imagine the projects being conceived now for targeting individuals and population subsets to change opinion, mood, etc. using things like social media, targeted communications, etc.

The US then and now was totalitarian and authoritarian. Some of you, especially here on hn, may not fall into those mind-sets but it doesn't matter - you've lost - you're barely scraping by, working 60 to 80 hours a week and you have no time to change your environment. Meanwhile the political class is able to work full-time on perpetuating their power while taking away yours. You have no power, no rights, because they have been chiseled away the last 30 years by the authoritarians.

I've said this before and I'm always downvoted but I don't care. Just leave. Go to Berlin, or London (not much better though), Switzerland, or anywhere else. Even if you go to someplace like the UK that isn't much better than the u.s. you will at least no longer be contributing to a government spending 10X to 100X of any other country on arguably evil pursuits. Take your wealth-creation skills to somewhere else where you won't be contributing to your our demise.

I know that many of you will discount this one event as a one-off - MLK was certainly special. But it's only a one-off because it was the start of this sort of campaign against someone that can bring change.

smm2000• 12 years ago

Chill out and pick different audience. Most people on HN are not just "scraping by" unless making >$100k first year after college is now called scraping by. I would say overall HN audience benefits much more from current political, economic and financial situation than suffer from it. It's probably not true for reddit so you can find more receptive audience there.

comrade16• 12 years ago

By scraping by, I mean working 60+ hours per week for those wages. Here in Switzerland we work a normal workweek (45 hours) for an average wage 2x that plus a better quality of life.

Germany and London pay much less though but experienced developers can get decent wages.

Edit: also, when I lived in the u.s. and ma"de significantly more than 100K I still felt like I was scraping by. Taxes in the u.s., especially California, are high, expenses are high, and plus I had no time to spend my money anyway. If take a couple weeks off to travel every now and then but would have to at least answer emails while traveling. No more of that.

opendais7• 12 years ago

I don't think most people on HN are making over $100k unless they are in the Bay Area or NYC.

Many, many places that "starting salary" is more like $50-60k.

dmishe• 12 years ago

Fantastic username choice.

internet_arguer2• 12 years ago

I'll bite. From one troll account to another.

It's interesting when someone from Switzerland claims the moral high ground about a country's past wrongs. Switzerland has a colorful history of Nazi collaboration and laundering of stolen treasure by the 3rd Reich.

Is that an unfair characterization of you as a modern Swiss person? Yes.

Just like comparing 1960s America to the present day. The U.S. may not live up to the ideals that are plastered over it's monuments, but it's certainly not contributing to your demise (whatever that means).

Just leave. Go to ...

Spoken like a true Swiss. No, we all don't have the spare funds or network of employers to travel to a different country at will. Not to mention, SV is the epicenter of venture capital in software, not Zurich. Who are the VCs who would fund a startup's relocation to Zurich?

contributing to a government

You can be forgiven for this, but U.S. citizens are perpetually bound to pay taxes even when residing abroad. The first $90k is forgiven, but the next must be taxed. Oh, and the state (e.g. California) doesn't play by these rules; it takes the full amount.

seanmcdirmid• 12 years ago

The US will tax you after the first $90k, but you can deduct your foreign paid taxes, so this is only a problem if you live in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Switzerland where the income tax rate is lower (housing deductions can help after this point, though).

California is crazy in how they handle overseas expats.

comrade16• 12 years ago

I'm not Swiss, I'm American.

The Swiss provided a service to the Jews in Germany and helped hide their money from the nazis. Unfortunately most of their customers were killed... If I lived in a country with a corrupt or evil government I would try to move my money to Switzerland too, but the u.s. Is making it increasingly difficult to conduct finance anonymously.

Based on your other comments... I'm not sure if you're aware of the rest of the world. ETH is on par with MIT and EPFL is high up there as well. There is a good start up community here in Zurich, but it's true that VC isn't as advanced here - it's still mostly angel investors. Google has a big office here and it seems to be adding to the enovironment.

But I'm not sure if Silicon Valley is a good goal. I've live and worked there for startups and two big mainstream companies and have no desire to go back that desperate life.

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

If you think you're shocking anyone with your accusations, you're kidding yourself. Paranoia is the default mindset of the American people.

BTW, it's a mindset that is often mocked by Europeans when it comes to subjects like health care, vacation, taxes, guns, etc. But the reasons for it seem obvious now, don't they?

The idea that the U.K., German, or Swiss governments are less authoritarian than the U.S. is laughable to U.S. citizens. You can't see it because you trust those governments; but most Americans got over that a long time ago.

refurb6• 12 years ago

The idea that the U.K., German, or Swiss governments are less authoritarian than the U.S. is laughable to U.S. citizens.

Considering that the UK will throw people in jail for expressing their right to freedom of speech is a slight counter to your argument.

gadhra• 12 years ago

I'll bite.

I want to move! I'm an American web developer living in California, and I want to go to Switzerland or Berlin. I only speak English. What do I do next?

rglover3• 12 years ago

Something that's always confused me about the world and people as a whole. Why are so many people hell bent on implementing some "moral standard" that everyone needs to follow? Honestly?

There's this bizarre projection of the individual and his/her motivations onto every living being that fails to make any logical sense.

Is there any psychological premise for why we feel the need to dictate the behavior of others such that they perfectly mirror how we behave (or in many cases, wish to)?

There appears to be a tipping point where someone agrees with a certain set of values and as opposed to stopping at enforcing those values on themselves (reasonable), they go absolutely nuts trying to push it onto everyone else.

A sort of: how dare you.

nraynaud3• 12 years ago

MLK was a religious ministry, so his job was to spread some kind of moral standard on other people anyways. So 1) his moral standard where known 2) it was quite fair for his opponents to use those moral standards against him.

(I'm not defending the letter or the FBI, I just think a minute detail of the story is consistent)

wwweston• 12 years ago

It's fair enough to characterize King's work as part religious ministry, and I think it's also fair to consider what it means that King's walk didn't live up to all of the standards one would assume would come with his apparent Christianity.

I'm not sure it is in fact fair "to use those moral standards against him", though, unless you're working with a conception of moral standards as a game in which the point is to cast your team into The Good Guys and the other team as The Bad Guys. And sure, some people play that exact game (the FBI is doing it here), but you can also approach moral standards as ideals which would make the world better if we could adhere to them. The latter conception still means that people who fail to keep standards can suffer natural consequences (as well as artificial ones of standing) if they don't adhere, but it's not much of an attack on the moral authority of the standard.

There's also a question of a sort of standards severability. King is known for agitating for racial equality and social justice, not for being a crusader for the virtues of chastity and fidelity. If he'd been known to privately abuse and privilege based on apparent race, or inclined to acquire wealth at the expense of others, that'd seem be a bigger deal.

Finally, a little bit of C.S. Lewis:

"The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

Again, none of this is to discount the value it might have to consider an MLK with weaknesses and some questionable behavior. Or, for that matter, the value of fidelity.

GhotiFish2• 12 years ago

Is this an inditement of Dr. King, the FBI, Or the EFF?

Are you inditing all three of them?

I'm pretty sure all three parties have put their words to action, and are fully willing to follow their moral beliefs in addition to foisting those beliefs on others.

rglover3• 12 years ago

No one in particular, this article just brought the thought to mind.

njharman2• 12 years ago

fails to make any logical sense

By and large humans are not logical, our actions are not logical/rational at least on individual basis. They are rational from a evolutionary species domination POV. We are herd animals. Enforcing "moral standards" is outcome of Herd dynamics. e.g. way to maintain control / "leader of the herd" status and to distinguish other herdmembers.

andrewflnr• 12 years ago

Less cynically, moral cohesion is important for social cohesion, which is critical for survival. So from that perspective it makes perfect sense. It's just carried too far most of the time.

te_platt• 12 years ago

This is somewhat simplistic but consider life as a kind of prisoner's dilemma. Cooperation has many benefits and the people cooperating have a strong incentive to make others cooperate as well. It's not an exact match but try substituting "cooperation" where you would use "moral standard" and it will usually make good sense.

Mandatum• 12 years ago

Personally I think it's more motivated, at least in the beginning, by said person wanting them to be "better". Said person feels they should act this way, as it's "better" and tries to force it on them.

Similar to how you'd feel towards people getting payday loans. Don't do it. Because X, and X is a valid reason to me to not do it. So you shouldn't do it.

At least personally, not giving advice that's isn't asked for is really hard at times because I think I usually have good advice. But that's exactly how "those" people feel.

sopooneo2• 12 years ago

It's probably not the case here, but the reason I always supposed is that people secretly resent the moral rules they strive to follow, and think, "hey, if I've got to do this, so do you!"

rglover3• 12 years ago

Ha! I like that. Never thought of it that way.

diminoten• 12 years ago

I find myself afraid to criticize this submission, because I don't feel an honest discourse about this submission can take place on Hacker News.

That should sadden you, as it saddens me.

declan3• 12 years ago

Much of this was known before, including the FBI's anonymous letter attempting to provoke a suicide. As others said elsewhere in this thread, documents came out during the Church Committee. I wrote this 15 years ago when I worked at Time:

      The FBI's campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther
      King began in December 1963, soon after the
      famous civil rights March on Washington. It
      started with an extensive -- and illegal -- electronic
      surveillance of King that probed into every corner
      of his personal life. 

      Two weeks after the march, the same week King
      appeared on the cover of Time magazine as "Man
      of the Year," FBI agents inserted a microphone in
      King's bedroom. ("They had to dig deep in the
      garbage to come up with that one," FBI director J.
      Edgar Hoover said of the Time cover story.) Hoover
      wiretapped King's phone and fed the information to
      the Defense Department and to friendly
      newspapermen. 

      When King travelled to Europe to receive the
      Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover tried to derail meetings
      between King and foreign officials, including the
      Pope. Hoover even sent King an anonymous
      letter, using information gathered through illegal
      surveillance, to encourage the depressed civil
      rights leader to commit suicide. 

      "The actions taken against Dr. King are
      indefensible. They represent a sad episode in the
      dark history of covert actions directed against
      law-abiding citizens by a law enforcement
      agency," a Senate committee concluded in 1976. 

   […]

      History reveals that time and again, the FBI,
      the military and other law enforcement
      organizations have ignored the law and spied on
      Americans illegally, without court authorization.
      Government agencies have subjected hundreds of
      thousands of law-abiding Americans to unjust
      surveillance, illegal wiretaps and warrantless
      searches. Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King
      Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic
      priests were spied on. The FBI used secret files
      and hidden microphones to blackmail the
      Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and
      influence presidential elections.

http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Shame we never had any Church committee after the Snowden revelations. Where are all the NSA "reforms" now? They even have the nerve to say that the "pendulum has swung too far" in favor of privacy, when absolutely nothing has changed in the form of law since then.

pmoriarty• 12 years ago

What's changed is that a lot of this surveillance is perfectly legal now.

The surveillance state has written itself a blank check.

declan3• 12 years ago

Where are all the NSA "reforms" now?

Yep. It's been ~18 months since we first heard of Edward Snowden, and there have been no significant policy (as in, presidential executive order) or legal changes to NSA surveillance authority.

I don't know why there's no modern-day Church committee, but here are a few hypotheses:

1. Sen. Church was running the investigation circa 1975, a few years after Watergate was exposed and a year after Nixon resigned. I suspect there was much more public concern about executive abuses than there are today, and the GOP's willingness to defend the Nixon administration was limited post-Waterage (compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D in the White House).

2. Much of FedGov's surveillance abuses pre-Church were clearly illegal and criminal. The lesson intelligence agencies learned is that, no matter how dodgy the behavior, as long as there's an AG opinion theoretically blessing it, you won't be prosecuted. So the surveillance abuses today may violate the 4A and our sense of proportionality, but they aren't clearly indictable offenses. Instead of "clearly illegal" you have "AG blessed in a written opinion and lawyers may disagree."

3. There was no Intelligence Committee back then, so TLAs were more limited in being able to get congressional buy-in for warrantless surveillance. Now there is, and Feinstein (and Rs on it as well, to be sure) have been the biggest defenders of the NSA post-Snowden. They have to be: they were read in on the programs and were complicit in any wrongdoing. Answer: argue there was none!

4. Forty years after the Church Committee, people now may expect to be under surveillance (sadly) and expect FedGov to be corrupt. Look at post-1970s movies like Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, etc. So what would have shocked the average American's conscience 40 years ago may now be almost expected. (This is the boiling-frog theory.)

5. There's a lot more inflation-adjusted $$$ to be made from the surveillance-industrial complex now especially post-9/11 than there was 40+ years ago. It may be an order of magnitude higher. More tax $$$ kicking around == more support in Washington officialdom.

I'm sure there are other explanations too but those are the first that come to mind...

e12e• 12 years ago

Well, maybe there is a committee. But for national security reasons, it would obviously have to work in secret, and it's findings would be secret. Can you prove that there haven't been a classified audit of the NSA, in accordance with the classified rules that were enacted to enable such a classified audit?

ableal• 12 years ago

Much of this was known before

For a time-capsule view of the mood on the issue, there's this 1965 novel by Rex Stout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang

It's part of the series about sedentary detective Nero Wolfe, one of my literary guilty pleasures. While being all for law and order, Stout was not too keen on unbridled authority, and his characters would often tweak a policeman's metaphorical nose.

jack-r-abbit• 12 years ago

If this hadn't been labeled "suicide letter" I never would have read into it that the writer wanted King to kill himself. "You know what to do" is actually pretty vague. Do what? Come clean about his affairs? Leave the country? Quit being a pain in the ass for the government? Quit working on civil rights?

sopooneo2• 12 years ago

Do we have a guess as to why they wanted him dead? Was it that those in power believed the rise of African American citizens would disrupt the power structure and their position in it? Or was it purely racist, with the powerful just believing it was wrong for black people to have equal rights?

rooster84• 12 years ago

The URL was changed to the NY Times article that originally broke the story, but this post originally linked to an EFF interpretation of the article:

FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

pitt1980• 12 years ago

maybe we should compare some of these misdeeds to the misdeeds of the various communist governments that inspired those misdeeds

jqm• 12 years ago

To me, the most ironic part of the whole situation is Hoover's private behavior...

That aside, there is very little doubt in my mind Hoover was a bad man. The sad part is, many people eventually are bad given the chance and they never even know it. This is why impartial rules and transparency are important.

This may not be a common sentiment, but I look forward to the day when we are governed by machines rather than monkeys. I mean... the constitution, the rules of state and religion, they are algorithms no? Designed to remove as much as possible the corruptible human element from the equation? So why not take this concept a level further? That's my thinking.

Eventually there will always be another Hoover. But the next one might have better tools. But I think the human race can build a better system based on principals of efficiency, impartiality and beneficence. And maybe after a bit more waste, abuse and needless suffering caused by greed (that is the bottom line with the people who run the Hoovers of the world no?) it will.

What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

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