Counterintelligence: There's Something Happening Here

Imagine if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents who has done little more than exercise constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly but have found yourself "on the list." Until I started reading David Cunningham's sociological analysis There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence, I didn't understand the logic behind endlessly investigating people who had broken no laws and only wanted to prevent senseless killing. But I think his detached study of the ways the FBI used counterintelligence against the New Left and the Klan can tell us a lot about what many Americans are enduring now at the hands of our politically saturated intelligence agencies:

"At times [The FBI's] intelligence activities have have been reactive, responding to illegal or politically extreme actions or rhetoric, but more often agents have monitored targets for their perceived potential to engage in such dissident activity. In this way, the Bureau has fashioned a mission that stresses agents' ability to anticipate future threats, often indiscriminately targeting suspects for their ostensible hidden activities. From the FBI's perspective, certain political groupings - including "anarchists," "communists," and "terrorists" - are subversive and are therefore legitimate intelligence targets, even in the absence of visible challenges to the state, precisely because they represent a broader, invisible conspiracy. The logic of conspiracy is insidious and self-reinforcing: the continued investigation of targets is justified whether or not agents uncover evidence of actual insurrectionary activities, as a lack of such evidence merely signals a deeper conspiracy that an be exposed only through still more intensive investigation" (pgs. 8-9).

What would it be like to be on the other side of such a wild goose chase? Are these the sort of intelligence expenditures that will shield us from people who actually want to harm us?

~~ There's Something Happening Here