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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

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.

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In J. Edgar Hoover's mind

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

It wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover, it was everybody under him that cooperated with him on things like this.

Another thing to bear in mind was that a large part of the civil rights movement was blacks trying to exercise rights which they theoretically had a legal right to exercise in the 1950s and 1960s - vote in federal elections, travel in integrated interstate buses and use the bus terminal facilities during transfers, attend all-white public schools which the Brown decision had forbid in 1954 etc. So this was the government using its intelligence powers to secretly persecute people who were trying to non-violently exercise the rights they technically had under the law.

Who know what political uses the information stored in the Utah Data Center will be used for in the future?

The case against King was a little more specific than that, though still not a reasonable basis for suspicion: One of his close associates had historical ties to the US communist party.

It was such a weak case that Hoover had to really push on LBJ to let him go after King so aggressively, and probably reflected cryptic racism as much as his fear of communism.

All governments to varying degrees seem to operate with a number of hidden imperatives, with one being "maintain the status quo." There will always be some within the government bureaucracy who see anything that deviates from the status quo of their host society as criminal or an enemy.

I get that. And that, compared to the terrorism threat, communism was a real issue. It didn't look like we were winning, and there really were people on foreign government's payroll in the US. The problem is the ends didn't justify the means, because they were wrong.

I do consider myself patriotic, but we have to fess up when we get things so wrong.

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.

So much of the debate in discussion about this is whether police/FBI "abuse their power", are or are not "evil", if Hoover himself was obsessed, whether King was a saint or a hero or a fraud, was this or that legal, etc.

I'm wondering more about what might be called the "collective subconscious" of the elite and powerful, which knows that black America doesn't forget slavery, Native Americans don't forget conquest, the part that remembers that a government's first and foremost enemy is its own people.

The civil rights movement represented (re-presented) a direct threat to the establishment. It wasn't just the south, there were riots in every major city. Malcolm X was gunned down in NYC. The impoverished black populace, then and now, is a powder keg of rage and misery ready to explode, so targeting leaders was the tactic then. Now we have mass incarceration, with a significant percentage of the black population in jail, or denied full citizenship as felons.

I guess I'm wondering just how much "law enforcement" effort is spent on this high-value problem, instead of on the myriad fantasy "crime-solver" cases that our lovely entertainment establishment narrates in cop show after cop show.

For those who don't wish to Google, Fred Hampton was a Black Panther leader assassinated in his bed by Chicago police acting in concert with the FBI.

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?

I would not doubt at all that the government is blackmailing extremist Muslims any chance they get. (And, interpret "extremist Muslims" as anybody Homeland Security thinks might be so.)

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