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Spying on citizens
not unusual RON HUTCHESON / Knight Ridder | May 14 2006 WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush has assured Americans that their government isn't spying on them, but history explains why many remain uneasy about this week's news that their phone records have been turned over to federal agents. The government has a long track record of abusing personal information that's gathered in the name of national security. From the Red Scare in the 1920s to illegal wiretaps during the Nixon era, Americans have struggled to find a balance between individual rights and collective security. "The potential for abuse is awesome," a Senate investigation committee concluded in a 1976 report detailing wiretaps, break-ins and other abuses that government agents committed in the 1960s and '70s. The Senate panel, known as the Church committee after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, warned that technological advances would make it even harder for the government to stay within acceptable limits of respecting privacy rights, especially when the nation is at risk of attack. "The distinction between legal dissent and criminal conduct is easily forgotten," the committee wrote. "In an era where the technological capability of government relentlessly increases, we must be wary about the drift toward 'Big Brother government.' " The government has been collecting and storing information on its citizens since at least 1912, when the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, recruited well-placed people to eavesdrop on conversations and report any suspicious talk. By the Red Scare in the 1920s, when the government made large-scale arrests of radicals and leftists, the bureau had assembled a rapidly expanding database of more than 150,000 names. Abuses over the years cross party lines and political ideologies. Franklin Roosevelt wanted a file on Americans who sent him critical telegrams. Lyndon Johnson asked the FBI to get him the phone records of Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew. Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved wiretaps on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly every recent president has ordered name checks -- a search of FBI files for any damaging information -- on political opponents. The Church committee concluded that few politicians can resist the chance to gather information on their enemies, and few intelligence gatherers can resist pressure to please the president. There's been no evidence so far that any phone records the government has collected recently in its search for terrorists have been misused, but that's small comfort to civil libertarians. "Men are not angels," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "Our Constitution was written by people who understood that human nature has many flaws." In some cases, intelligence-gatherers try to use information they collect against their enemies. In one of the most notorious examples, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover launched a campaign to discredit King that included an attempt to get him to commit suicide. After gathering evidence of King's extramarital affairs, the agency sent a compilation of incriminating audiotapes to King's wife and sent him a note suggesting he take his own life. Bush's defenders say the current controversy bears no resemblance to past abuses. "We're in a war with terror and there are people out there that want to kill us," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. "They're not tapping our phones and getting our conversations." ---------------------------------------------------
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