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Big Brother is Watching. Again.

Operation CHAOS

In late October of 2001, President Bush signed the USA Patriot Act, giving broad new powers to both domestic and international security agencies and kicking many basic concepts of "privacy" in the teeth. The Patriot Act provides for much more domestic surveillance, including pulling library records and individual records from ISPs, easier wiretap approvals and widespread monitoring of web surfing.

While some argue that the Patriot Act is unconstitutional (at least, in part) and look forward to challenging it in court, the history of domestic spying by US intelligence agencies is pretty rich. One of the most infamous cases was the Operation CHAOS.

You can trace the roots of Operation CHAOS to Castro's takeover of Cuba in 1959. The Eisenhower administration wanted to monitor the Cuban exiles flooding into the US, both to look for criminals and to find allies for a Cuban counter-revolution. The FBI originally spied on the Cubans, but the CIA had already infiltrated other foreign groups in the US, so it was no great stretch for them to take over the operation.

Eventually, the CIA was burglarizing foreign embassies, "interviewing" US citizens who'd traveled to strategically sensitive parts of the world and monitoring travel by foreigners and US citizens. When Vietnam War protests escalated and sent the Feds into a paranoid frenzy, their domestic spying broadened to include anyone that could be considered a threat to national security, and by a threat they meant anyone who openly disagreed with the government. This is how someone like Martin Luther King ended up under constant surveillance. This kind of domestic spying went on into the 1970s.

Fear is a great tool to convince people to go along with actions they would never normally consider. Terrorism is a tool, too. It creates random fears of shadows, of the unknown, of the foreign. The terrorists win when we learn to reflexively run from these things. The worst parts of our own government win, too. The parts that want us to march in lock step and not ask questions. The agencies and shadow men who find all individual thought and action suspicious and dangerous. If you’re reading this now, if you’re on this site, you’re probably already in some suspects' database. Do you feel less afraid of Al Qaeda? No, I didn't think so.

Samuel Johnson once wrote that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Don't be scared into buying into the Patriot Act. The same draconian laws scoundrels put in place to "protect" can be used to silence and destroy. Just look ta the history of the groups in charge of these laws.

http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/lyon.html

Posted by Kadrey at December 28, 2002 08:25 PM

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