The 1960's - famous as a decade of revolutionary reform - was also a time of government oppression and persecution.  The social reformers of the Sixties were checked by the force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation which, during the turbulent decade, kept tabs on allegedly 'subversive' groups in the interest of a vaguely-defined 'national security.' In practice, the FBI and its head J. Edgar Hoover worked to prevent legitimate political groups and individuals from exercising their constitutional rights.  These groups were far from the violent conspirators Hoover and company made them out to be; in most cases these were parties and organizations whose only "crime" was disagreeing with the established political structure, and for that reason they were also disproportionately on the left of the political spectrum.  To thwart these 'foes', Hoover devised the Counter-Intelligence Program, commonly known as COINTELPRO.  From its inception in 1956 to its official end in 1971, COINTELPRO was responsible for multiple cases of robbery, harassment, blackmail, and murder.  Ostensibly started to insure 'national security', COINTELPRO accomplished little more than the violation of American civil rights.
	Additionally, the civil rights-violating techniques devised during the Sixties have found a rebirth in the current government's post-9/11 endeavors.
Hoover's persecution of the left began in the 1950's under the tutelage of Senator Joseph McCarthy.  It was Hoover who recommended Roy Cohn to McCarthy as the chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, a position from which Cohn and McCarthy later launched their attacks on alleged communists (Joseph McCarthy). They were unsuccessful; the groups and individuals they persecuted were law-abiding and McCarthy never uncovered the communist plot of US destruction.  Regardless, the Red Scare made many government institutions fearful of communist activity.  In 1954 the Senate censured McCarthy and in 1957 he died.  By the time of the Sixties, McCarthyism had abetted and the nation was ready to embrace new ideas.
But Hoover remained steadfast in his belief that communists had their sights set on American destruction.  In the 1956 he devised COINTELPRO as a means to check the various liberal groups that were rising to power, claiming that they were ripe with communist infiltration.  Among those on Hoover's watch-list were the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party USA, which was now legal (it was not during the time of McCarthy).  The leaders of these parties were constantly under surveillance (a worrisome fact given the fatal finales of men like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark).  When COINTELPRO papers were finally declassified, it was revealed that the FBI secretly raided the office of the SWP roughly once every three weeks.  Its raids never uncovered any subversive activities, despite six years of break-ins (Blackstock ix).  Needless to say, breaking into the offices of a legitimate political party is highly illegal, though the government's ignorance for the law in this case shows how the FBI could easily have been involved in the famed 1972 break-in of a larger political party's office.
The FBI wasn't always content to sit on the sidelines and observe, however.  Other methods were much more active and intrusive.  The staple of COINTELPRO was harassing letters mailed to liberal leaders and activists.  Some of these sought merely to prevent socialists from getting jobs as school teachers (Blackstock 172).  Others sought to prevent liberal coalitions from forming, as was the case when the FBI unsuccessfully tried to divide the SWP and the Vietnam-protesting New MOBE (155)  or successfully end the friendship between Black Panther leaders Geronimo Pratt and Huey Newton (Churchill 86).  Still others were more sinister in their intent, such as the letter mailed to Dr. Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide (Blackstock 8).  Most of these letters were mailed anonymously, though sometimes they were mailed under the false pretenses of being from an organization's member.  (Signatures on letters included, "A Soul Sister," and "Your 'Nasty' Friends") (107). These cases of harassment were some of COINTELPRO?s greatest successes.  Letters and phone calls kept social and political leaders out of work, dissolved their marriages, and sometimes inspired them to wrong-doings.  One COINTELPRO document, when commenting on gang wars in San Diego, reads, "it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program" (10).  The FBI, rather than keep Americans safe, invested its efforts in provoking gang wars in the ghettos of Sand Diego.
When the FBI couldn't get gangs to do its dirty work, it did it itself.  The previously-mentioned assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are prime examples.  Hampton was a powerful speaker and a rising leader in the Black Panther Party.  These qualities landed him on the FBI's watch-list.  An FBI infiltrator, William O'Neal, set himself up as Hampton's personal bodyguard.  To erase felony charges against him, O'Neal gave the FBI detailed information on Hampton's apartment, including a floor plan (Churchill, 70).  On December 4, 1969, police raided the apartment and killed Hampton and Clark, who was asleep on a couch.  The original police account of the raid described it as a vicious gunfight, though the Black Panthers immediately proved that this was false.  The police fired over 200 bullets at the sleeping pair.  Hampton and Clark were not criminals; they were merely political opponents of the men who ran the Bureau, and for this they were murdered (Churchill 71).
Knowledge of infiltrators like O'Neal did not go unnoticed among groups who saw themselves as potential future victims of COINTELPRO.  Besides the Black Panthers, the FBI sent agents into the peace movement and groups like Students for a Democratic Society.  An infiltrator in the Socialist Workers Party even ran for office in 1972 (Blackstock xi). Luckily, these groups were careful to avert the same fate as Hampton.  Students for a Democratic Society, for example, included in their 1967 national convention a workshop titled "Sabotage and Explosives" that was designed to pull in infiltrators.  It worked, and one agent grimly recalled that the room was full of, "everyone who didn't fit the mold, who appeared to be 'undercover workers'" (Cunningham).  Other tales include infiltrators who blew their own cover simply by wearing wing-tipped shoes.  Though these misguided efforts are comical now, certainly they were of the utmost gravity in the Sixties, and events like Hampton's murder will never be a laughing matter.  The infiltrators of the Sixties and Seventies were sworn to serve the Bureau, not the groups they infiltrated, and thus by acting in these groups the government infringed upon the rights to assemble and speak freely.
To be an activist leader in the Sixties meant to fear government intrusion; Malcolm X, Hampton, and Mario Savio knew this and incorporated it into their lives.  Savio was a student and leader of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964.  At the time, Berkeley forbade any political discussion or lobbying on campus.  Savio vehemently fought this, once leading a 32 hour sit-in that trapped a police car carrying an arrestee who had broken the policy.  As was its tendency, the FBI became interested in Savio.
Hoover ordered an assessment of communist activity in the Free Speech Movement.  Curtis O. Lynum, special agent in charge of the San Francisco FBI office, wrote the assessment and concluded that, "the demonstrations would have taken place with or without any participation by subversives [communists] because of basic grievances" (Curtis in Rosenfeld).  Curtis recognized the students' valid concerns, but Hoover wasn't convinced.  In 1965 he warned Congress that the Movement at Berkeley was inspiring Communist groups to infiltrate other student movements and stepped up surveillance on Savio (Rosenfeld).
Later that year, Savio abruptly left the Free Speech Movement.  Seeking a quiet study at Oxford, he married and left for Europe, but the FBI was not content to let him go.  The Bureau obtained a copy of his marriage license, interrogated the court clerk who issued it, and notified the CIA and other authorities in London, Rome, and Paris that the Savios were coming.  Immigration and Naturalization Services notified the FBI after any encounter with the couple, including their return to the States in 1965 with a newborn baby.  Over the next decade, Savio drifted in and out of political activism, constantly struggling with depression and marriage problems.  He was never shown to have any dealings with communists, yet the FBI continued to contact his employers, monitor his address and tax returns, and generally keep surveillance on him until January 21, 1975.
Cases like Savio's are illustrations of the FBI's abuse of and divergence from the COINTELPRO charter.  Savio was not a threat to national security, yet a decade of his life became the subject of government scrutiny when the overzealous FBI perceived him as one.  Sadly, Savio was not the exception to the rule.  By 1963, the FBI had 441,000 'subversion' files opened on individuals and organizations (Rosenfeld).
The actions of the FBI were ignored (or supported) by conservatives in government who had no love for the left, but often times it was liberal Democrats who argued for these measures, perhaps out of fear of competition from a more liberal party (the SWP and BPP being just that) (Blackstock 19) .  To right this, in 1973 the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities formed under the direction of Senator Frank Church.  The so-called 'Church Committee' sought to answer questions raised by the recent fanaticism of the intelligence community as illustrated by the 1972 Watergate break-in.
The Church Committee gave COINTELPRO its first public condemnation from within the government.  All of the Bureau's actions - from leaking tapes regarding King's sex life to prying tax returns from the IRS - came under review.  It found that the program's purpose was, "preventing and disrupting the exercise of First Amendment rights" and that through COINTELPRO, "the Bureau took the law into its own hands, conducting a sophisticated vigilante operation against domestic enemies" (Rosenfeld).
What the Church Committee neglected to say, but what others concluded, was that despite the Buerau's abilities to take provisions outside of the law, it still failed to uncover any sort of Communist conspiracy, just as it failed to prevent a substantial anti-war movement from forming.  Its only successes were on the individual basis, where it managed to disrupt the personal lives of victims of its civil liberties violations.
By this time it was too late, however.  COINTELPRO officially ended in 1971, perhaps due to the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, which made it harder for the government to keep its secret files secret.  The end of COINTELPRO did not signal the end of its operations, however.  As the termination notice explained, the program, "should now be discontinued for security reasons," but will continue, "on a highly selective individual basis with tight procedures to insure absolute secrecy." (Blackstock 38).  The methods of COINTELPRO went deeper into the government's underground, not to surface again for nearly thirty years.
After September 11th, 2001 the government began a furious restructuring of the intelligence community.  It tore down the bureaucratic wall of separation between the CIA and the FBI, and John Ashcroft became the first Attorney General to expand the FBI's authority without consulting Congress (Rosenfeld).  The post-9/11 political environment was focused on routing terrorism and terrorists in much the same way that the Fifties had been to communism.  And, just as COINTELPRO grew from the Fifties' Red Scare, so the government's new civil rights abuses grew and continue to grow out of Ashcroftian-hyper-paranoia.
The USA PATRIOT Act passed through Congress just 45 days after September 11th, amidst dramatically increased amounts of media speculation and fear-mongering.  The PATRIOT Act greatly increased the powers of the intelligence community, including relaxed requirements for search warrants and wire taps.  Previously unseen in American history, new "sneak-and-peek" searches allowed law enforcement to conduct searches and read library records without the knowledge or consent of the party in question (Mittelstadt).  These searches bear a striking similarity to the raids of the FBI on the Socialist Workers Party headquarters in the Sixties, which were also performed covertly, though illegally.  The government, it seems, learned some lessons from the failures of COINTELPRO, but not the right ones.  It has legalized its domestic espionage but not realized its ineffectiveness or inherent unconstitutionality.
As the post-9/11 environment cooled, startling information surfaced regarding the government's renewed COINTELPRO-like operations.  In California, a group of anti-war activists called Peace Fresno unintentionally blew the cover of a local police infiltrator when his obituary was published in the paper following a motorcycle accident (Galvan).  Films like Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 and Nonny de la Peņa's Unconstitutional revealed Attorney General Ashcroft's new ability to hold citizens who he personally determined to be "terrorists" for indefinite amounts of time.  Needless to say, this was an extreme violation of the right of habeas corpus, though sadly it continues today.  When the facts finally came to light, Americans saw that its government was once again violating its civil liberties, and in greater ways than it had previously.
COINTELPRO revealed the dedication of the FBI, its directors, and its workers to the security of America, even at the expense of American constitutional rights.  The  failures of COINTELPRO should be proof enough that the targets of such programs are inevitably not communist-infiltrators of liberal groups but instead are, "the domestic groups themselves," as the Church committee so aptly found (Rosenfeld).  The lessons we should take from COINTELPRO are not the ones the government found; we should not trample the Constitution to insure that our law enforcement can violate the law, but instead recognize the potential dangers of such "blind-eye" police work.  Keeping America safe should never mean harming Americans, and that is precisely the end product of both COINTELPRO and the USA PATRIOT Act.
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