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Cointelpro

by georgecmu on 1/30/25, 6:19 PM with 22 comments

• by joe_the_user on 1/30/25, 7:42 PM

  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.

• by walterbell on 1/30/25, 7:28 PM

  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...

• by ranger_danger on 1/30/25, 7:14 PM

  >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.

• by guerrilla on 1/30/25, 7:43 PM

  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...

• by bigoljim on 1/30/25, 8:29 PM

  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.

• by jihadjihad on 1/30/25, 7:07 PM

  > 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.