CSotD: There’s always a crisis; Back to the books!
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One of the frustrations of campus activism in the 1960s was the history professors who would blandly dismiss it all, citing other times when the world had seemed on the brink, as a reason we should just carry on with our studies and let matters unfold.
It gives me pause, since I now, nearly a half century later, find myself looking at the surveillance issue and saying, "Yeah, well, we've seen all that before, and worse."
So I look at Gary Varvel's cartoon and chuckle a little — remembering the graffito, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you" — and I also feel compelled to note that the "thousands" of violations were among tens of millions of intercepts and seem mostly to be along the line of wrong numbers rather than substantive intrusions and were apparently not intentional misapplications on anyone's part.
And I'm also at some pains to point out that, back in the analog days, intercepts meant someone having to actually listen to phone calls or read letters, which isn't happening with this wave of intrusion.
The current practice appears to simply be the collection of data in the event that anyone will later decide that some dots are worth connecting, which presumably could have and would have still taken place under a subpoena/search warrant, since nothing on the Internet ever really disappears.
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! Collecting now spares time and red tape in future!
Meanwhile, the historian in me not only remembers when the FBI would park at the curb and observe, and when our mail was intercepted and read, but also when things got a great deal nastier than that.
A reminder came Sunday, when NPR's Weekend All Things Considered aired an interview with the daughter of Viola Liuzzo, the housewife-activist murdered by Klansmen for taking part in the march to Selma in 1965.
It's worth a listen or at least a read, not simply for the horror relevant to this discussion, but for the reminder that not everybody who stood up in those days was a "professional agitator."
But this portion of the story stood out to me as a reminder of what was going on back then, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave:
After Viola Liuzzo's death, there were
newspaper reports that Liuzzo had gone south to meet and have sex with
black men. Another rumor claimed she was a drug addict. And the July
1965 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal published a poll that
asked if readers thought Liuzzo was a good mother. Fifty-five percent
didn't. ("I feel sorry for what happened," said one woman in a focus
group convened to talk about the Liuzzo story, "but I feel she should
have stayed home and minded her own business.")
The family
couldn't figure out why anyone would say such things. Then, when the
Klansmen were put on trial for Liuzzo's death, they learned that a key
witness was a paid FBI informant who had been in the Klansmen's car.
Years later, the family sought to have Liuzzo's FBI file opened. They
finally succeeded, and that's when they discovered that the rumors about
her had come directly from J. Edgar Hoover. The family believes the FBI
director was desperate to divert attention from the agency by smearing
her.
It was hardly an isolated incident: Hoover also ran COINTELPRO, which harassed activists and dissidents in a variety of ways, including planting false rumors and otherwise monkeywrenching the various movements.
At which point the Old Man says, "Pshh … this is chickenfeed. You're fools if you thought you lived in an ideal world. We've seen this stuff before, and worse."
And that's true.
But it's also true that we survived those times with our nation more or less intact because not everyone sat back and passively watched it go down.
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