Cointelpro | Hacker News Reader

Cointelpro

en.wikipedia.org

91 pointsgeorgecmu22 comments

Notable passage: "The program was secret until March 8, 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies."

Most of the various programs involving the CIA spying on, harassing and so-forth Americans have been revealed by either whistle blowers like Edward Snowden or group like the "Citizens' Commission" (basically a group of radicals, not a public organization). Which is to say that a lack of discussion of such activities isn't evidence they are not occurring.

So, in other words, you're saying that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"?

Would these be known unknowns or unknown knowns?

We can neither confirm nor deny these knowns.

This probably means that FBI has done way worse stuff than this. It just wasn't exposed yet.

I knew an idealistic woman who went to the 9th ward after Hurricane Katrina to help people. She joined an impromptu group that had amongst it's organizers a Black Panther. The group was infiltrated by an undercover FBI agent and broken up. That's my anecdote. COINTELPRO was alive and well in 2005, at least.

As a conservative, I went to a later Occupy Wall Street rally. Interesting people.

The feds were obvious, and they were stirring up shit.

Any non-fiction sources on 50 years of innovation in this field since cointelpro, across the globe? There was a 2020 US story [1] about TLOs: non-law-enforcement citizen informants.

We also have private actors (e.g. eBay stalking conviction [2]) drawn from former state actors. Plus non-state actors and transnational campaigns [3].

There are a few TV shows and movies on public-private predictive tech analytics and nudge interventions.

[1] Austin TLOs (Threat Liason Officers), https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-...

[2] eBay lawsuit, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28049706 & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

[3] China transnational repression, https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/chi...

Maybe this?

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spying-on-the-l...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1347478/Mark-Kenned...

>The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the "national security" the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.[1] Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

So how are we going to prevent history from repeating itself (which it looks like it already is)?

All it takes for bad people to win, is for good people to do nothing.

Coming to a reasonable consensus on what constitutes good and bad would be a start.

We can’t even agree on that, in the US, at least.

Something to keep in mind trying to reason about appropriate responses and preparation:

The IC now has a century or so invested in perfecting the techniques whereby good people are led to do either nothing or bad thing, some of which are almost impossible to either detect or disrupt unless you are actively on guard—and that may well not save you.

One analogy is to image yourself the target of "pick up artist" strategies backed by state-level resources. Not just one person matching their manipulation—based on focused study on human motivation, belief steering, and behavior steering—but an institution.

Against the concerted efforts and craft of a committed IC you and I are utterly helpless...

...as individuals.

Systemic confrontation and disruption is IMO the only viable path to preventing this sort of abuse under people like Patel.

> So how are we going to prevent history from repeating itself (which it looks like it already is)?

This kind of operation has never stopped.

Historically you pretty much have to wait for the institutions to over extend itself before an opportunity arises for means reversion. Fascism can never be satisfied with the status quo- it must take actions for actions sake. The enemy is always inferior yet all encompassing. Fascists will always lose in a war of equals because the longer they stay in power the further they stray from reality.

You need Congress to make clear, explicit changes to laws on the subject. Not just to add additional restrictions, but to make changes to liability. Right now, a lot of violations will get chastised in court, but the officials responsible will face no consequences due to qualified immunity.

I don't claim to know what the right was to address this situation is, this is a thorny legal issue, but someone needs to think through options and consequences.

Remove the concept of qualified immunity (which has no congress-passed law creating it as a concept) and replace its utility against spurious prosecution with a blanket mens rea requirement for individual blame for regulatory offenses in an official capacity.

The program showed the "bad people" were already in charge and using covert method to remove their enemies. Cointel in particular was revealed by the efforts of radicals as a one-time thing. There's no reason to think that programs of it's sort ever stopped (though I'd guess levels of activity naturally waxed and waned, there haven't been the level of assassinations we saw in 60s but all probably just involves a different emphasis within the programs).

The main thing is that the existence of a large secret agencies maintaining whatever secrets they deem necessary makes a mockery of democracy in and of itself (beyond all the other things that do this in the US).

We aren't — the current administration is going to accelerate civil rights abuses not address them.

the "bad" people you mention need "good" people to work for them

so yeah, when will ethics > money?

Has this ever stopped? Judging by recent events - The FBI-staged kidnapping of the governor of Michigan, the heavy FBI involvement in the "J6 riots" - it looks like the program is as alive as ever. I also don´t think the new FBI director will change much about this other than possibly a change of ideological focus. That is, unless Patel makes good on his desire to "rebuild the organisation from the bottom up" which I somehow doubt.

After the Soviet Union fell apart the KGB was "abolished" and the FSB took its place. Did this really change the organisation when the FSB was largely staffed by former KGB personnel from top to bottom? The same would most likely be true for a "reformed" FBI.

Hate to post the same thing so soon again, but here's a list of a bunch more related ops and examples of COINTELPRO as well:

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/us_atrocities...

The 1992 Rage Against the Machine song, Wake Up (which appeared in The Matrix movie) has a section that is a reading of a COINTELPRO memo from J. Edgar Hoover.

> After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote:

  "In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech ... We must mark him now if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security."

> Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King's home and his hotel rooms, as they were now aware that King was growing in stature daily as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement.

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