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J. Edgar Hoover Back at the 'New' FBI
Classified FBI Bulletin Reveals Tactics at Protests

Americans of a certain age remember the FBI's counter-intelligence operation, COINTELPRO, which, during its years of operation from 1956 to 1971, surveilled, infiltrated, manipulated, and tried to provoke criminal activities by entirely lawful civil rights and anti-war demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to oppose government policies.

In the 1970s, the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities so exposed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's relentless violations of the Bill of Rights, very much including the First Amendment, that Attorney General Edward Levi—the best constitutionalist in that office in our history—established new FBI guidelines to keep its agents within the bounds of the Constitution.

And Senator Frank Church of Idaho, chairman of that Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, pledged in 1975, "The American people need to be reassured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers a threat to the established order."

Attorney General John Ashcroft has broken that pledge more times than I can count, because so much of his surveillance of we the people is done in secret. But Ashcroft's overturning of the Levi FBI guidelines was perpetrated publicly in May 2002, when he set new FBI guidelines in the spirit of COINTELPRO. As a May 31, 2002, New York Times editorial charged: The FBI now has "nearly unbridled power to poke into the affairs of anyone in the United States, even when there is no evidence of illegal activity." ...

...In what part of the Constitution does the FBI have the authority to put in its databases the names of protesters using the Internet to organize peaceful demonstrations?

FBI Intelligence Bulletin no. 89 also alerts local police that "activists often communicate with one another using cell phones or radios to coordinate activities or to update colleagues about ongoing events. Other types of media equipment (video cameras, photogenic equipment, audiotape recorders, microphones, and computer and radio equipment) may be used for documenting potential cases of police brutality and for distribution of information over the Internet."

Good grief! These persons under suspicion actually document out-of-control police during demonstrations—and they also communicate with each other in the course of a demonstration!

This FBI "Law Enforcement Sensitive Bulletin" ends, "Law enforcement agencies should be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts to the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force."

But why does this brooding FBI bulletin contain so many references to entirely legal protest activities? Like this one: "Activists may use intimidation techniques such as videotaping" during demonstrations. Who is intimidating whom? (Emphasis added.) ...