USA: COINTELPRO

the Village Voice: J. Edgar Hoover Back at the 'New' FBI

If you go around telling people, "We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations," that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in FBI files.
—American University constitutional law professor Herman Schwartz, commenting on FBI Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, October 15, 2003, "Tactics Used During Protests and Demonstrations"



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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."