NSA, Bush-FISA, COINTELPRO and Other Government Surveillance Abuses

COINTELPRO (short for “counter-intelligence program”), was one of the more scandalous of the FBI’s secret programs authorized under its then-director, J. Edgar Hoover. The operation, revealed in 1971, involved intrusive and — you guessed it — widespread surveillance of Americans, and targeted political activists in particular. At one point, the FBI even bugged Martin Luther King’s hotel room to get some dirt on him. Unlike the NSA’s PRISM program, COINTELPRO was also totally and completely illegal, although their stated goals were pretty much the same: "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order."

[Image: Saint Iscariot via Flickr]

Project SHAMROCK and its sister program, Project MINARET, were started in August of 1945, and involved accessing and storing all telegraphic data entering and leaving the U.S. At one point, the NSA was accumulating around 150,000 messages a month. It was terminated after Congress began to investigate and criticize the program for its ambiguous legality, and one result of the investigations was the creation of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, meant to limit the NSA’s powers. (Oh, how we laugh.)

[Image: Whiskeygonebad via Flickr]

This scandal wasn’t so much about mass surveillance. But it involved Ireland’s Prime Minister, Charles Haughey, ordering his Justice Minister to illegally tap the telephones of journalists who were criticizing him. When the incident was revealed two years later, it caused a big ruckus that forced him to resign. In spite of denying it for over a decade, Haughey finally admitted to the scandal in 1992 and apologized. Because that's super helpful.

[Image: TG4TV via Flickr]

In 1989, it was revealed that federal authorities and certain police forces in Switzerland had illegally collected (and kept) roughly 900,000 folders on the public — most of whom weren’t suspected of any crime at all. A public outcry led to the establishment of a citizens' popular committee to abolish the political police (although the effort ultimately failed). In 2010, a similar scandal erupted — a parliamentary watchdog accused the state of collecting around 200,000 files on its citizens and foreigners. This time, though, the reaction was a general shrug.

Nicknamed “Watergate of Korea,” it actually wasn’t so much mass surveillance as the (very illegal) specific surveillance of people who opposed the South Korean government. In 2010, it was revealed that the Prime Minister’s ethics team — a government body that was created to investigate corruption among civil servants — had actually kept tabs on politicians, journalists, and activists, and any civilians who weren’t so happy with the government. How’s that for irony.

In December 2005, The New York Times published an article claiming that soon after 9/11, President George W. Bush had given the NSA the power to eavesdrop without warrants inside the United States, bypassing the FISA court. USA Today reported similar findings in 2006, claiming that the NSA had been “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.” An interview with ex- AT&T worker Mark Klein in 2006 highlighted the extent of the snooping under the Bush administration:

“It appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet — whether that be peoples' e-mail, web surfing or any other data,” he said. “Given the public debate about the constitutionality of the Bush administration's spying on U.S. citizens without obtaining a FISA warrant, I think it is critical [...] that the American people be told the truth about the extent of the administration's warrantless surveillance practices.”

You can say that again.