Big Brother

The Bush Administration's cry that they will never abuse NSA and will only spy on America's enemies never quite satisfied me. From the Atlantic archives if the FBI has spied on such enemies of America like MLK in the past should they really be given the benefit of the doubt this time?

The transcripts from the wiretaps on King and his advisers also answer a question that came to preoccupy President Lyndon Johnson just as it had the Kennedy brothers and J. Edgar Hoover: Was Martin Luther King Jr. any kind of Communist sympathizer? Of course not—but the FBI never passed along to Johnson or to anyone else what King said to Bayard Rustin one day in early May of 1965, when the SCLC was tussling with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over a public statement proclaiming movement unity: "There are things I wanted to say renouncing Communism in theory but they would not go along with it. We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us but they wouldn't go along with it." Instead the FBI continued to distribute utterly misleading reports that declared just the opposite; as one newly released CIA summary from just a few weeks before King's death asserts, "According to the FBI, Dr. King is regarded in Communist circles as 'a genuine Marxist-Leninist who is following the Marxist-Leninist line.'"

I am not against wiretapping American citizens or having massive computers scan a suspected terrorist or accomplice's emails or cell phone conversations per se, but it must be done with appropriate Congressional and Judicial supervision, actually following FISA and not solely under Bush supervision. And the whole idea of big-brother out recording and filtering and saving every e-mail sent a la Echelon style makes me very uneasy, and I cannot possible fathom the rationale behind this massive datamining project and how it will possibly help national security [more problems with the concept at the Corner]. Having such massive amounts of information, but with not enough men and women to analyze and possibly interpret it is senseless. Such a program is ripe for abuse. Unregulated government spying has happened in the past and is happening now. Security is important, but maintaining the very essence of our democracy, liberty and freedom, is much more important in the long term than anything that terrorists or our nation's enemies ever could inflict.