Spying on Big Brother - Nat Hentoff for V V

Nat Hentoff - Village Voice
Spying on Big Brother
Now you can find out if you're being surveilled by the FBI or the NYPD.
by Nat Hentoff
December 2nd, 2006 9:08 PM
American Civil Liberties Union documents show . . . the Pentagon . . . keeping tabs on nonviolent protestors . . . including Quakers and student groups . . . by collecting information and storing it in a military antiterrorism database. —ACLU, October 12, 2006

As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government. —Serious humorist Dave Barry, Knight Ridder syndicate, New York—Daily News, December 12, 2004

The New York Civil Liberties Union . . . is starting a campaign to teach "radical" activist groups how to obtain their own government surveillance files from the FBI, Pentagon, and New York City Police Department. —The New York Sun, November 14, 2006
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During the 1950s and 1960s, I often reported in the Voice about the FBI's omnipresent, omnivorous surveillance of, and infiltration into, entirely lawful groups during J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program)—its searching for "subversives" of many creeds and colors. (Also involved, as was eventually disclosed, were the CIA and the secret, warrantless National Security Agency.)
When later I got my own FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act, there were many pages—including Voice columns, protest petitions I'd signed, and even the names of the ghettos in the Russian cities from which my late parents emigrated to the United States. There was also a report that I'd attended a meeting of "radicals" in North Africa. (I've never been in any part of Africa.)
Since 9-11, the ceaseless, accelerating extent of government surveillance of many millions of us exceeds anything the malign J. Edgar Hoover could have yearningly imagined. But George Orwell, in 1984, had a sense of what was coming:
"How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0649,hentoff,75194,2.html

published in California? . . . thought I read that somewhere awhile back, but can't find the link . . .

so many of the alternative weekly papers have been swallowed up.