from Hacker News

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

by rooster8 on 11/12/14, 10:20 PM with 202 comments

by declan on 11/12/14, 11:57 PM

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

by wyager on 11/12/14, 10:44 PM
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.
by Mikeb85 on 11/12/14, 11:11 PM
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...
by samirmenon on 11/12/14, 10:53 PM
The New York Times actually broke the story.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...
by alukima on 11/12/14, 11:00 PM
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/
by mynameishere on 11/12/14, 11:09 PM
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.
by opendais on 11/12/14, 10:51 PM
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.
by scintill76 on 11/12/14, 11:03 PM
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.
by johnny99 on 11/12/14, 11:16 PM
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
by rglover on 11/12/14, 11:42 PM
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.
by neue on 11/12/14, 11:03 PM
When was the letter written? What marked the significance of '34 days later'?
by rooster8 on 11/13/14, 12:52 AM
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...
by jqm on 11/13/14, 4:28 AM
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.
by jack-r-abbit on 11/13/14, 12:04 AM
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?
by sopooneo on 11/13/14, 12:35 AM
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?
by josho on 11/12/14, 11:35 PM
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.
by codezero on 11/12/14, 11:18 PM
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?
by dangayle on 11/12/14, 11:36 PM
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.
by pitt1980 on 11/13/14, 2:48 AM
maybe we should compare some of these misdeeds to the misdeeds of the various communist governments that inspired those misdeeds
by comrade1 on 11/12/14, 11:39 PM
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.
by daveloyall on 11/12/14, 11:11 PM
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!
by baxterross on 11/12/14, 11:38 PM
The government does more harm than good
by diminoten on 11/12/14, 11:56 PM
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.