Activists under surveillance: the FBI files

Left History, 2012

Review of Robert Justin Goldstein, American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (2008); Ivan Greenberg, The Dangers of Dissent: The FBI and Civil Liberties Since 1965 (2010); and Tim Wiener, Enemies: A History of the FBI (2012).

American Communist History and Free Expression Policy Project, 2014

Seth Rosenfeld, a San Francisco reporter, spent thirty years in litigation against a stubbornly resistant FBI to obtain all the files that form the raw material for Subversives, his copiously detailed narrative of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California/Berkeley in the 1960s, and of the FBI’s many underhanded efforts to destroy it. Leading characters in this political drama are Ronald Reagan, governor of California from 1967-1975 and a longtime informer for the FBI; Clark Kerr, president of the sprawling University of California system—the quintessential man caught in the middle of the battle—; Mario Savio, icon of the student movement, gifted orator, and deeply troubled soul; and above all, J. Edgar Hoover, whose power as FBI director over more than 60 years enabled him to unleash his lengthy repertoire of dirty tricks against not only any group or individual he thought was communist-inspired, but also against liberal political dissent.

Socialism and Democracy, 2018

Marx demonstrate a powerful mind at work. But I found myself quarrelling with the way he forces critical theory into the constraints of an "open Marxism" and into the strictures of negation. For one thing, it does not seem to me to be politically realistic nor desirable to dispense with the Enlightenment ideas of the modern state and law, nor for democratic institutions and constitutionalism. In the end, Grollios insists that: "The only purpose of a critical theorist is to make us aware of the antinomies inherent in our schizophrenic way of living in capitalism" (168). But in truth, if we accept this assertion, we in fact condemn critical theory to being a purely academic enterprise. Negation needs to be seen as a mode of consciousness, not its sole operation. We have to be able to posit concrete, rational alternatives to the defective forms of social life under capitalism lest we destroy the possibilities of real politics. It is precisely this lack that made thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer a kind of dead end politicallythey saw no alternative to the density of reification of modernity. What is needed is, as Lukácsthe only one of the theorists Grollios treats who performed any kind of genuine revolutionary political activityproperly knew, was a speculative moment to round out the negative one. That knowledge of a just human society would be one premised on our cooperative interdependence on one another. To overcome our alienation from this central, radical thesis will require more than negation, it will necessitate a vision of what kind of social relations, ends and purposes are democratic and just. Negation simply must lead to something politically positive to fight forto deny this is to consign critical theory to eternal practical irrelevance.

The United States emerged from World War II as the sole dominant force but in fear of preserving and maintaining that advantage. They required a restructured military and centralized intelligence services in line with a developing Cold War strategy of geopolitical control. In 1947, the National Security Act established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC) in order "to collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to assist the President and senior US government policymakers in making decisions relating to national security." A close encounter with CIA archives, however, cracks that façade and reveals the methods behind the stated goals. 1 Despite its declarations to the contrary, the CIA's endeavor has been a dirty and sinister business. Collection and dissemination of data somehow turned into coups, assassinations, "extraordinary rendition" kidnappings, use of torture, "black sites," assistance in executions, staged wars, and sponsorship of dictatorial regimes. Undertakings through Eastern Europe, Latin and Central America, Asia and the Middle East, and the so-called "war" on drugs and terror were conceptual models based on imperial principle: the US government administering "undesirables" (people, groups, and countries) though implicit and explicit interference. This is hardly a surprise. In the last months of World War II, the "interventionists," guided by George Kennan, expanded the activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, from intelligence-gathering to covert operations. Kennan and 1 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)., page number.

This article explains how secrecy influenced the communication and decision-making processes of the FBI's covert and illegal program to disrupt left-leaning Black political organizations between 1967-1971. Memos exchanged between the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and field offices reveal the explicit techniques for concealing their identities as the source of their anonymous communication. The Bureau's techniques point to the high degree of coordination among organization members required to maintain organizational secrecy; they also point to the ways in which secrecy enabled the organization to engage in reprehensible behavior.

Review of International American Studies

This article explores the ways gender and race influenced the FBI’s surveillance of Black women activists. Previous scholarship has covered the role of surveillance in repressing revolutionary movements and neutralizing radical organizations. Historically, within many social movements, Black women have been marginalized, silenced, or reduced to only their gender because of patriarchal leadership. As a result, the persistence of sexism within these Black movements has affected Black women’s visibility within movement organizations. This piece asks, how does gendered marginalization impact their surveillance by and visibility to the FBI? It seeks to understand the influence of race and gender on the FBI’s surveillance of Louise Thompson Patterson. By examining the language and narrative components of her FBI file, the article provides an analysis across gender and across time to theorize the dynamics of surveillance, race, and gender. Based on a close analysis of Patterson’s FBI file,...

1971 'CITIZEN'S COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE THE FBI' COINTELPRO, 2019

.... This paper seeks to understand the work and ideas of Walter Polakov and how these might have generated surveillance by the anti-liberal and anti-leftist government organizations of the interwar years and the 1940s. What factors might have protected Polakov from surveillance and official mistrust until 1941? And when the FBI began their processes of scrutiny and questioning, what were they looking for?

Radical History Review, 2011

The Bush administration's so-called war on terror needs to be situated within the context of earlier efforts to demonize dissent. Since the early 1970s the FBI has increasingly linked the threat of terrorism to lawful domestic social movements to undermine their legitimacy and blur meaningful distinctions between violent and peaceful political activity. In recent years, the FBI has become the leading control agency in what scholars and popular writers term the “surveillance society.” The FBI monitors public spaces and has deployed increasingly sophisticated technological surveillance. The bureau also has developed a new “preventative paradigm,” viewing well-nigh all street protest as dangerous. Recently declassified government records are beginning to document how the FBI, using its expanded powers, played a major role in threatening the rights of free speech and of assembly after 9/11.