'60s Free Speech leader got caught in FBI web (Hoover/AssKKKrap comparison

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/10/MNG0996S3P1.DTL

excerpt:

J. Edgar Hoover's FBI targeted Savio because he was the nation's first prominent student leader of the '60s, and top FBI officials feared protests would spread from Berkeley to other schools, the records show.

The bureau used tactics against Savio that Congress in 1976 found were improper -- including some similar to investigative methods that agents may now use against suspected terrorists under the Patriot Act and under loosened FBI guidelines, experts said.

According to hundreds of pages of FBI files -- and, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, as reported in today's Chronicle Magazine -- the bureau:

<snip>

-- Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.

<snip>

David Sobel, general counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C., group that has challenged some of the government's efforts to expand the collection of personal information, said many of the tactics used against Savio -- such as putting his name on "watch lists" and collecting personal financial data and school records -- are "ancestors" of current surveillance systems. He said Savio's case was a "cautionary tale" about how the combination of power and secrecy can lead to intelligence abuses.

...more...

FASCISTS

:shrug:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO>

Very detailed write-up. Pay particular attention to the "History" section:

Excerpt:

The program was secret until 1971, when an FBI office was burglarized and many secret documents were stolen. The crime was never solved, and the group responsible slowly leaked the documents to various members of the media and Congress. Within the year, Director Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled on a case-by-case basis. He did not promise that the FBI would stop using COINTELPRO tactics.

Further documents were revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern and by the SWP, and in 1976 by the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the "Church Committee" for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. However, millions of pages of documents remain unreleased, and many released documents are entirely censored.

The Church Committee documented a history of the FBI being used for purposes of political repression as far back as World War I, through the 1920s, when they were charged with rounding up "anarchists and revolutionaries" for deportation, and then building from 1936 through 1976.

The FBI claims that it no longer undertakes COINTELPRO or COINTELPRO-like operations. However, critics claim that agency programs in the spirit of COINTELPRO target groups like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador and the Anti-Globalization Movement.

The "Methods" section is also VERY revealing.

for distributing antiwar literature at his coffeeshop when he came home.
He committed no crime but was set up by cointelpro fascists..

Oh sorry that is where we are now. Maybe we are just going around and around. They will do all this and we will stop it once more. No one learns a thing. I am telling you the same news shows at the movie I saw as a kid, and I am 70, could be put up to day. They all look the same. Dead, or hurt children, old women and men, many on carts on the roads going anyplace where planes are not bombing them. I will say I never thought it would be USA planes.

The evil ones were the ones who questioned the government about the war.

So many elements of the 60s are being repeated today.

Hoover was a monster -- turns out a monster wearing a dress.

I was in high school in the Bay area -- and managed to get to Berkeley during a couple of the demonstrations.

This was a time of the suppression students by adults -- and we learned that adults were afraid of us. (note -- that many of the gains in student rights of my generation are being suppressed by today's adults, as if we are stepping backward in time.)

I remember that a group of students had a meeting with the Principal -- and he was shaking. The meeting was on school business -- there was no confrontation -- but he was afraid of us! Those of us who were in that room -- all had the same experience and witnessed his reaction. The student body was in no way radical -- the only "crime" on campus was smoking cigarettes.

This was the early days of the anti-war movement -- on college campuses.

Most high school students were pro war -- in my high school I was the only one who was against the war. I remember even then my question was -- how long will this war last. Where was the plan to win the war? Many of our fathers were serving off the coast of Vietnam, including my own father.

Probably why Hoover and those like him hated the college students -- because this was when we all became aware of our own mortality. Kids our age were off in the jungles dying -- for a theory. The guys realized that they were a few bad grades away from being sent to a war they wanted no part of.

The biggest crime seemed to be to ask WHY? We were questioning adult authority -- and the adults were afraid of us.

To be for world peace was a crime to many adults -- America -- love it or leave it -- bumper stickers were common on cars.

Flash Back for me -- the Xmas card greeting --

Peace on Earth -- good will toward men.

This time -- this war -- christmas greetings came across as a farce -- and I felt like I had stepped into a time machine.

I wish I could share your confidence that "we will stop it once more." The monsters in power now have been gradually setting up conditions wherein one extremist political party controls everything forever. They already control all levels of federal government and much of the computerized voting equipment. Their ability to finesse the results will only improve in time so automatic recounts would not be triggered, even if they were possible in the first place. Even paper verified voting does not protect against a rigged GOP "win" that is too big to trigger an automatic recount. Their rigged exit polls can create a he said, she said situation. And the corporate media have already demonstrated that when democracy is at stake, they are not willing to defend it (e.g., 2000 election theft). AND the UN is generally unwilling to get their hands dirty, despite all their high sounding rhetoric to the contrary.

The Patriot Acts and further mutations of it could stop organized resistance before it could ever get any traction. Is there any confidence at this point that your telephone, fax, email or even messages such as ours here in the forums are really safe from spook surveillance. They're already planning for the possibility of incarcerating large numbers of people if "social upheaval" occurs.

How will effective countermeasures be carried out that will enable us to "stop it once more?"

Speaking to more of your comment, it is a sad thing to recognize our nation as the aggressor and bad guy. Earlier in our lives, yours and mine, while we weren't watching so closely, they were doing it and getting by with it because the information wasn't being flashed around the world instantly in great detail into every home with electricity. Now, especially through the Internet, it seems that it is out in the open, and, at least for the time being, we are able to get enough information that it becomes more obvious what is going on. On the other hand, now they are so powerful it doesn't seem to matter that the whole world is watching.

Quoting the article:

Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency.

I wonder if there are any such lists today and who would be included in such lists.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to all the people who run it, to the people that own it, that unless you’re free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.
-Mario Savio, December 2nd 1964

A March To Irrelevance
By Matt Taibbi

<snip>

Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain them, and because our leaders now know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded, the protesters simply go home and sit on their asses until the next protest or the next election. They are not going to go home and bomb draft offices, take over campuses, riot in the streets. Instead, although there are many earnest, involved political activists among them, the majority will simply go back to their lives, surf the net and wait for the ballot. Which to our leaders means that, in most cases, if you allow a protest to happen... Nothing happens.

The people who run this country are not afraid of much when it comes to the population, but there are a few things that do worry them. They are afraid we will stop working, afraid we will stop buying, and afraid we will break things. Interruption of commerce and any rattling of the cage of profit – that is where this system is vulnerable. That means boycotts and strikes at the very least, and these things require vision, discipline and organization.

The '60s were an historical anomaly. It was an era when political power could also be an acid party, a felicitous situation in which fun also happened to be a threat. We still listen to that old fun on the radio, we buy it reconstituted in clothing stores, we watch it in countless movies and documentaries. Society has kept the "fun" alive, or at least a dubious facsimile of it.

But no one anywhere is teaching us about how to be a threat. That is something we have to learn all over again for ourselves, from scratch, with new rules. The '60s are gone. The Republican Convention isn't the only party that's over.

Edit to add emphasis

Full: http://www.alternet.org/election04/19840/