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In times of great terror and panic, the citizens of a nation must decide what they value most: their right to privacy or the lives of the innocent. Government surveillance is criticized, however there are times in a nation’s history where, in order to ensure the safety of their citizens, they must surveill the country for potential hazards that might exist in the world. The government-issued program, COINTELPRO--a series of illegal projects during the twentieth century organized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation--while heavily criticized for its unconstitutional grounds--was justified because it benefitted the nation during a period of upheaval. COINTELPRO is popularly condemned by historians and professors such as Brandeis University Professor of Sociology, David Cunningham, who asserts that the FBI counterintelligence program was only a form of repression that allowed for the government to suppress matters that they consider bothersome (234) This however was not the case. COINTELPRO was necessary because of the great social unrest, individuals posed threats to society, and creating operations that were beneficial to the United States.
COINTELPRO was founded by the FBI in 1956 as a government program for counterintelligence. The FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, was instrumental in the program’s creation. After the age of McCarthyism best known as the Second Red Scare, Hoover was concerned about the institution of Communism gaining popularity within the United States. This gave way to the creation of COINTELPRO. The program originally focused on infiltrating the Communist Party within the United States and then instilling disorder and confusion via numerous tactics. The program mainly used espionage to allo...
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...versity, n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013. .
Los Angeles Times (1964). "Klan's Revival Feared in Burning of Crosses." Editorial. Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles] 20 Jan. 1964: 1. Http://hn.bigchalk.com/hnweb/hn/do/search. ProQuest Company. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.
Roy, Joseph T. "New Black Panther Party." Http://www.splcenter.org/. Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. .
Trueman, Chris. "The Black Panthers." The Black Panthers. Http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/, 2000. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
Winter, Catherine. "American RadioWorks - King's Last March." King's Last March. Prod. Kate Ellis and Steven Smith. American RadioWorks. N.d. American RadioWorks - King's Last March. American Public Media. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. Transcript.
Mitgang, Herbert Lillian Hellman's FBI file, Dangerous dossiers: exposing the secret war against America's greatest authors, New York: D.I. Fine, 1988, retrieved from http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/hellman-per-fbi.html
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was created in 1938. They were focused on investigating and putting an end to Communists and Communist supporters in the American Society. Their first major attack was on the Hollywood film industry. Communists in the Hollywood industry were said to be placing subversive messages into films. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and others like Senator Joseph McCarthy pestered communists and supporters of the Communist party.
Taylor, James Stacey. "In Praise of Big Brother: Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Government Surveillance." Public Affairs Quarterly July 2005: 227-246.
In 1938, a committee was formed to find suspected communists in America; this committee was the House of Un-America Activities Committee or HUAC.
Wasserman, Steve. "Rage and Ruin: On the Black Panthers | The Nation." The Nation. N.p., 4 June 2013. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
At the end of World War II, and the introduction of the Atomic Bomb, the FBI began working on background security investigations for the White House and other government agencies, as well as internal security for the executive branch of the government. In 1945, the FBI raided a magazine company that was particularly interested in the Far East and discovered a multitude of classified state documents. Around this time, Americans feared the invasion of Communism, which triggered the FBI to investigate people within the U.S. whom were suspected of sabotage and undermining Democracy in the name of Communism. The FBI's role in fighting crime grew yet again after the Korean War.
Whether the U.S. government should strongly keep monitoring U.S. citizens or not still is a long and fierce dispute. Recently, the debate became more brutal when technology, an indispensable tool for modern live, has been used by the law enforcement and national security officials to spy into American people’s domestic.
From 1910 to 1934 Du Bois was the editor of the association's periodical The Crisis, which reported on race relations around the world. The new organization grew so rapidly that by 1915 it was able to organize a partially successful boycott of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed blacks of the Reconstruction era in a distorted light (Spartacus 2). Most of the NAACP's early efforts were directed against lynching. In this area, it could claim considerable success. In 1911 there were 71 lynchings in the United States, with a black person the victim 63 times; by the 1950s lynching had virtually disappeared.
As the Griesa Document notes, the setting for the precursor to COINTELPRO was prior to the outbreak of World War II, as President FDR directed J. Edgar Hoover to avoid possible subversive activities by investigating alleged domestic fascist and communist movements. The order of command led this action to be taken up by the FBI, with the President ordering that other law enforcement groups turn over subversive investigations to the FBI. Effectively, this made the FBI the president’s secret police, ready to investigate
He called for a new organization having direct Presidential supervision, "which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies." Despite strong opposition from the military, the State Department, and the FBI, Truman established the Central Intelligence Group in January 1946. Later under the National Security Act of 1947, the National Security council and the Central Intelligence Agency were established. In 1949, the Central Intelligence Agency Act (also called "Public Law 110") was passed, permitting the agency to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures and exempting it from many of the usual limitations on the use of federal funds. The act also exempted the CIA from having to disclose its "organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed." It also created a program called "PL-110" to handle defectors and other "essential aliens" outside normal immigration procedures, as well as give those persons cover stories and economic support. The Central Intelligence Agency reports to U.S. Congressional committees but also answers to the President directly.
The breath-taking expansion of police power that the United States government took after 9/11 now poses as a troubling issue. Americans need to address the issues of government surveillance because it affects t...
5) Online University of the left RSS. “The Forbidden History of the Black Panther Party”. Web. May 07 2014.
Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E. Martin. Black Against Empire: the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkley: University of California Press, 2013.
Most people concerned about the privacy implications of government surveillance aren’t arguing for no[sic] surveillance and absolute privacy. They’d be fine giving up some privacy as long as appropriate controls, limitations, oversight and accountability mechanisms were in place. ”(“5 Myths about Privacy”). The fight for privacy rights is by no means a recent conflict.
Hillman, James. "Notes on White Supremacy: Essaying an Archetypal Account of Historical Events," Spring (1986): 29-57.