ACLU: Wake Up and Pay Attention

Author: Stephen DeVoy

The ACLU has been investigating FBI abuses of the PATRIOT Act with regard to the harassment of peaceful protesters and their organizations.  I support this investigation.  It is necessary and I believe it will bear fruit.  However, by limiting its investigation to the FBI, the ACLU is missing the lion's share of the new COINTELPRO.  The new COINTELPRO is not an FBI project.  The real force behind the new COINTELPRO is the Department of Defense.  The FBI is just one of many actors doing the DoD's bidding.

The new COINTELPRO relies heavily on electronic communications to do its dirty-work.  This has served it well as most of their targets are not computer scientists and have been mystified as to the origins of the harassment they have been receiving.  In choosing me as a target, the new COINTELPRO made a serious error in judgment.  I am a computer scientist, I did work for the Information Awareness Office, I am an activist, and I have spent three years of my life investigating and documenting the harassment.  The evidence overwhelming points to a COINTELPRO operation coordinated not by the FBI but by the Department of Defense.  Yes, the FBI is a player in the new COINTELPRO, but there are many other players as well, including but not limited to, defense contractors, local police departments and private volunteers.  This combination of players has allowed the new COINTELPRO to engage in acts that are well beyond the scope of the old COINTELPRO in terms of their abuse of private information and their blatant interference in the lives of targets.

The new COINTELPRO hides behind quasi-private covers.  It shows itself to the world in multiple faces, each of which appears to be directed at a small number of targets.  This creates the illusion that there is no centralized COINTELPRO operation.  The new COINTELPRO hosts its harassment and recruitment websites on private servers.  These websites are owned by defense contractors and registered anonymously.  They include classic bully sites, spoofed IndyMedia websites, and online forums ostensibly providing open space for political discussion but actually used to mine IP addresses and supply input for the creation of profiles on the political beliefs of their users.

In my own case, one private corporation, a defense contractor working for the DIA, provides the COINTELPRO operation with illegal telephone monitoring.  It has obtained this access under a program to develop a system for the Information Awareness Office that would look for telephone calling patterns of suspected terrorists.  This is not conjecture.  I can provide the ACLU with compelling evidence that they work for the DoD, that the telephone monitoring project was allocated to them by DARPA, that they have monitored my telephone conversations and that they have refused to deny having such access.  Another private corporation, a contractor for Homeland Security involved in the new CAPS system is the source of the claims of this COINTELPRO operation that I am on the no fly list.  This private contractor also received information from airlines containing personal details of passengers as documented in the press.  The two corporations mentioned in this paragraph share direct personal connections.

I can provide statements by the new COINTELPRO operation that they are "COINTELPRO with a military twist" and that they employ U.S. military PsyOps personnel.  I can provide the transcripts of an email dialog initiated by an individual at U.S. Army Central Command.  In this dialog he attempts to prompt me to express support for al-Qaeda.  I have documented the illegal revision of my websites by the U.S. Government.  In these revisions, statements critical of Donald Rumsfeld were repeatedly deleted by COINTELPRO.  I can provide the ACLU with information on where they can obtain the identity of officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency that visited my former employer in order to have me removed from my job.

The important point to this article is that the ACLU needs to expand its investigation of COINTELPRO.  The FBI is a small part of this program.  Most of the blatantly illegal activities of the new COINTELPRO are being executed by the Department of Defense and its contractors, not by the FBI.