Some basic features of the political culture emerging out of anonymity are neither new nor difficult to grasp. Consider the anonymous leak that revealed COINTELPRO, a systematic and illegal spying program leveled against the American population. One Pennsylvanian night in 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” forced its way into an FBI field office with a crowbar. As millions of Americans tuned into their radios to listen to Muhammad Ali square off with Joe Frazier in an epic fifteen-round boxing match, the activists emptied file cabinets of more than one thousand documents. Those on the subject of political surveillance were leaked to the media and published in the March 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, a journal of the War Resisters League, and COINTELPRO was revealed to the public for the first time. The program was initiated in 1956 by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and operated successfully until 1971.
COINTELPRO’s mandate was initially narrow: to disrupt the internal operations of the Communist Party USA, which Hoover believed to be under the direct influence of Russian infiltrators. Very quickly, its scope expanded to include the disruption of home-grown political activism of all varieties, including radical, conservative, and even moderate liberal efforts. One stated goal was to
prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position … King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.
And, indeed, the documents provide clear evidence of the elaborate steps the FBI took to monitor King in particular. The illegal surveillance lasted for years, starting in the late ’50s when the program was first authorized by Hoover. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, William Cornelius Sullivan, associate director of the FBI, wrote to Hoover, “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.” King was considered “an unprincipled man” who had a “weakness in his character.” Sullivan wrote, “We will at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” Soon after King was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine, the FBI was illegally authorized to bug his hotel room; “trespass is involved,” they wrote. The resulting transcripts were presented to Hoover, who responded, “They will destroy the burrhead.” The bugs captured evidence of King’s marital infidelity, which excited Sullivan and Hoover, since the recordings could be used to destroy the “animal.” An excerpt from the FBI letter sent to blackmail King evinces the ugly historical truth that the US government terrorized one of the nation’s most revered and peaceful civil rights crusaders:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
...
Let’s fast forward to February 5, 2011, when Anonymous uncovered a corporate plot devised by Washington, DC–based security firm HBGary Federal to spy on and disrupt WikiLeaks. Given the digital nature of contemporary documents, there is no longer a need to leave the comfort of one’s home, much less break into some office space, to access secret documents. Working together on IRC, Anonymous hackers penetrated the HBGary computer system and downloaded seventy thousand company emails, along with other files that included a PowerPoint presentation entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat.” The tactics suggested therein are strikingly similar to those practiced and perfected during COINTELPRO. The presentation outlines a set of strategies the firm claimed could be “deployed tomorrow”...
~~Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces Of Anonymous -by- Gabriella Coleman
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