Nowadays, thanks to computerized spying, these false facts, suspicions and "connections" can be disseminated further, faster, and longer . . . as in forever. Guilt by association linkages can be amplified. It's now guilt by algorithm or mathematical formula, says author Christopher Simpson. Operating with our phone records and Internet content, computers can run circles around any Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon champion.
WANDERING OFF TARGET
No matter what group is designated "Public Enemy Number 1" -- whether "Communists" in the 1950s/60s or "terrorists" today -- most of those surveilled and harassed will not be in the targeted group.
Over the decades, the FBI used the "Communist" pretext to spy on huge numbers of Americans, only a tiny percentage of whom were Communists. Internal documents show that Director J. Edgar Hoover, a racial bigot, unleashed the FBI against civil rights activists after being fully briefed that actual American Communists had shrunk to a tiny number and had virtually no influence on the civil rights movement.
In Los Angeles, I was part of a successful suit against the LAPD intelligence division tasked with preventing "public disorder" -- a squad that squandered millions of dollars and voluminous files in the 1970s and 1980s reporting on the activities of such violence-prone rioters as Cesar Chavez, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Susan Sarandon, Jackson Browne, L.A.'s first black mayor and thousands of other nonviolent citizens.
Why do spy agencies so often wander away from their designated "hard" targets to "soft" ones? It's easier and safer. The FBI devoted far more money and energy to disrupting Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent associates than to the murderous Ku Klux Klan. Today, trying to infiltrate closed, violent groups -- Al Qaeda-types, for example -- can get you killed; hanging out in American mosques is much safer . . . and you can convince yourself you're protecting the homeland.
It was perhaps inevitable that the huge "Counter Terrorism" apparatus set up after 9/11 -- Homeland Security, expanded FBI, enriched private security firms (which receive an estimated 70% of the U.S. intelligence budget) -- would be used against nonviolent Americans, such as the Occupy movement.
Justification for moving from a few dangerous sharks (actual criminals or terrorists) to lots of non-murderous minnows can often be found in the rhetoric of "aiding and abetting the enemy." If Bradley Manning can be charged with "aiding the enemy" for leaking evidence of war crimes to the public, is it a big jump for the spies to electronically monitor the 70,000 of us who've signed a petition saying that Manning is a hero?
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