Originally posted by john9001
if the NSA listens to my phone calls, they will be very,very bored.
what exactly are you afraid of, what "rights" have you lost? explain please in 5000 words or less.
For those who don't remember...let me take you back to the 1970s and the Church Committee. After Watergate broke, Congress investigated the unchecked intelligence gathering practices of the NSA, CIA, FBI, Army Intelligence, IRS and others. The Church Committee found that intelligence agencies had developed over 600,000 domestic intelligence files on US individuals; had opened and photographed 400,000 pieces of US mail; intercepted over a million telegrams; 11,000 IRS tax investigation were instagated by this domestic intelligence. And the Commiitee found that frequently the "law and the Constitution were simply ignored."
While the Committee found that most of these surveillance progams started with good intent, the Committee says that, "The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings." Most scary are the examples of political intelligence that was collected. Wiretaps and other surveillance methods were used on members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, and numerous mainstream and non-mainstream political figures. Vietnam protesters were identified for the IRS and were unreasonably targeted for audit. During Nixon's administration, a large part of the Democratic Party was under surveillance.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO – counterintelligence program – “was designed to ‘disrupt’ groups and ‘neutralize’ individuals deemed to be threats to national security.” COINTELPRO targeted “speakers, teachers, writers, and publications themselves" in direct conflict with 1st Amendment rights. Martin Luther King was one of the targets of COINTELPRO. One of the most disgusting actions of the FBI was a letter sent to King threatening to release embarrassing information about him if he did not commit suicide before going to Sweden to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
There are documented examples of how an unchecked intelligence community ruined private lives, destroyed marriages and ended careers through threats and innuendo of wrong doing.
The Church Committee also found that intelligence agencies sometimes warped intelligence to meet desired political goals: "The FBI significantly impaired the democratic decisionmaking process by its distorted intelligence reporting on Communist infiltration of and influence on domestic political activity. In private remarks to Presidents and in public statements, the Bureau seriously exaggerated the extent of Communist influence in both the civil rights and anti- Vietnam war movements."
While I like to hope that we would never see that kind of behavior again. I also recognize that human nature hasn't changed that much in the past 30 years. I think that unless the intitutional safegaurds that were put in place are followed, that it is very likely to have that dirty past come back again.
