Via John Whitehead @
The Rutherford Institute
“We want no Gestapo or secret police.
The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life
scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye
to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of
him.”—President Harry S. Truman
“
Don’t Be a Puppet” is the message the FBI is sending young Americans.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force is now
recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist.”
Using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist”
interchangeably, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that could distinguish an individual as a
potential domestic terrorist.
For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:
- express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
- exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)
- read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books
- show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
- fear an economic collapse
- buy gold and barter items
- subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation
- voice fears about Big Brother or big government
- expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties
- believe in a New World Order conspiracy
Despite its well-publicized efforts to train students, teachers,
police officers, hairdressers, store clerks, etc., into government eyes
and ears, the FBI isn’t relying on a nation of snitches to carry out its
domestic spying.
There’s no need.
The nation’s largest law enforcement agency rivals the NSA in
resources, technology, intelligence, and power. Yet while the NSA has
repeatedly come under fire for its domestic spying programs, the FBI has
continued to operate its subversive and clearly unconstitutional
programs with little significant oversight or push-back from the public,
Congress or the courts. Just recently, for example, a secret court gave
the agency the green light to
quietly change its privacy rules for accessing NSA data on Americans’ international communications.
Indeed, as I point out in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the FBI has become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be easily corrupted and abused.
When and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not
only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart
the decline of freedom in America.
Owing largely to the influence and power of the FBI, the United
States—once a nation that abided by the rule of law and held the
government accountable for its actions—has steadily devolved into a
police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the
show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of
the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law
is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people
into compliance.
The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes
surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation
tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse,
misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging
private property.
And that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues
and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to
Americans’ phone records; using
intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government;
recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then
entrapping them,
the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a
well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work
of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and
punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
The FBI was established in 1908 as a small task force assigned to
deal with specific domestic crimes. Initially quite limited in its
abilities to investigate so-called domestic crimes, the FBI has been
transformed into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency.
Unfortunately, whatever minimal restrictions kept the FBI’s surveillance
activities within the bounds of the law all but disappeared in the wake
of the 9/11 attacks. The USA Patriot Act gave the FBI and other
intelligence agencies carte blanche authority in investigating Americans
suspected of being anti-government.
As the FBI’s powers have grown, its abuses have mounted.
The FBI continues to monitor Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment activities.
COINTELPRO,
the FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and
neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically
objectionable, was aimed not so much at the criminal element but at
those who challenged the status quo—namely, those expressing
anti-government sentiments such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John
Lennon. It
continues to this day, albeit in other guises.
The FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only
targeted vulnerable individuals but has also lured them into fake terror
plots while actually equipping them with the organization, money,
weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then
jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the
FBI characterizes as “
forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
FBI agents are among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the
FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law,
“including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing
government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their
cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that
agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these
informants are getting paid astronomical sums:
one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run
over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the
trap for an entrapment scheme.
The FBI’s powers, expanded after 9/11, have given its agents carte blanche access to Americans’ most personal information.
The agency’s
National Security Letters,
one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act,
allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other
businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the
demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of
issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information
such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is
riddled with
widespread violations.
The FBI’s spying capabilities are on a par with the NSA.
The FBI’s surveillance technology boasts an
invasive collection of spy tools
ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell
phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone
calls. In one case, the FBI actually managed to
remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
The FBI’s hacking powers have gotten downright devious.
FBI agents not only have the ability to
hack into any computer, anywhere in the world,
but they can also control that computer and all its stored information,
download its digital contents, switch its camera or microphone on or
off and even control other computers in its network. Given the breadth
of the agency’s powers, the
showdown between Apple and the FBI over customer privacy appears to be more spectacle than substance.
James Comey, current director of the FBI, knows enough to
say
all the right things about the need to abide by the Constitution, all
the while his agency routinely discards it. Comey argues that the
government’s powers shouldn’t be limited,
especially when it comes to carrying out surveillance on American
citizens. Comey continues to lobby Congress and the White House to force
technology companies such as Apple and Google to keep providing the
government with
backdoor access to Americans’ cell phones.
The FBI’s reach is more invasive than ever.
This is largely due to the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was
$8.3 billion),
the government's vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of
government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion
centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the
country that constantly monitor communications (including those of
American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches
to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more
than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400
resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international
offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96
million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and
elsewhere, the FBI is also, according to
The Washington Post,
“building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a
top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building
in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of
Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime.
What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.”
If there’s one word to describe the FBI’s covert tactics, it’s creepy.
The agency’s
biometric database
has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world,
encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to
DNA,
and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law
enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long
before they ever commit a crime.
This is what’s known as pre-crime.
If it were just about fighting the “bad guys,” that would be one
thing. But as countless documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms
about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians,
spy on celebrities and
high-ranking government officials, and
intimidate dissidents of all stripes.
It’s an old tactic, used effectively by former authoritarian regimes.
In fact, as historian Robert Gellately documents, the Nazi police
state was repeatedly touted as a model for other nations to follow, so
much so that Hoover actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund
Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s
secret police. As Gellately noted, “[A]fter five years of Hitler’s
dictatorship, the
Nazi police had won the FBI’s seal of approval.”
Indeed, so impressed was the FBI with the Nazi order that, as the
New York Times
revealed, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other
government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis,
including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen, brought them to America,
hired them on as spies and informants, and then carried out a massive
cover-up campaign to ensure that their true identities and ties to
Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. Moreover,
anyone who dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
So not only have American taxpayers been paying to keep ex-Nazis on
the government payroll for decades but we’ve been subjected to the very
same tactics used by the Third Reich: surveillance, militarized police,
overcriminalization, and a government mindset that views itself as
operating outside the bounds of the law.
This is how freedom falls, and tyrants come to power.
The similarities between the American police state and past
totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany grow more pronounced with each
passing day.
Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies.
Surveillance. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread
corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. These are the hallmarks of every
authoritarian regime from the Roman Empire to modern-day America.
Yet it’s the secret police—tasked with silencing dissidents, ensuring
compliance, and maintaining a climate of fear—who sound the death knell
for freedom in every age.
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