The American Surveillance State

David H. Price

Description

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post 9/11 world, it’s accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American capitalism up to today, where they luxuriate in a near-limitless NSA surveillance of all.

Price looks through a roster of campaigns by law enforcement, intelligence agencies and corporations to understand how we got here. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover and the early FBI’s alignment with business, his access to 15,000 pages of never-before-seen FBI files shines a light on the surveillance of Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank and Alexander Cockburn, Native American communists and progressive factory owners.

Price uncovers patterns of FBI monitoring and harassing of activists and public figures, providing the vital means for us to understanding how these new frightening surveillance operations are weaponised by powerful governmental agencies that remain largely shrouded in secrecy.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Codenames

Introduction

Part I: The Long View: Historical Perspectives of American Surveillance
1. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s Institutionalization of Surveillance
2. Memory's Half-life: Notes on a Social History of Wiretapping in America.
3. The New Surveillance Normal: Government and Corporate Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism.

Part II: Lanting Those with a Communist Taint
4. The Dangers of Promoting Peace During Times of [Cold] War: Gene Weltfish, the FBI, & the 1949 Waldorf Astoria’s Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace
5. Tribal Communism Under Fire: Archie Phinney and the FBI
6. The FBI’s History of Undermining Legal Defenses: From Jury Panel Investigations to Defense Lawyer Surveillance Programs
7. Agents of Apartheid: Ruth First and the FBI’s Historical Role of Enforcing Inequality

Part III: Monitoring Pioneers and Public Intellectuals
8. How the FBI Spied on Edward Said
9. Seymour Melman: the FBI’s Persecution of the Demilitarization Movement
10. Traces of FBI Efforts to Deport a Radical Voice: On Alexander Cockburn’s FBI File
11. Medium Cool: Decades of FBI Surveillance of Haskell Wexler
12. Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI’s Historical Reliance on Phone Company Criminality
13. The FBI and Candy Man: Monitoring Fred Haley, A Voice of Reason During Times of Madness
14. David W. Conde, Lost CIA Critic and Cold War Seer

Part IV: Policing Global Inequality
15. E. A. Hooton and the Biosocial Facts of American Capitalism
16. Walt Whitman Rostow and FBI Attacks on Liberal Anti-Communism
17. André Gunder Frank, the FBI, and the Bureaucratic Exile of a Critical Mind.
18. Angel Palerm and the FBI: Monitoring a Voice of Independence at the Organization of American States
19. The FBI’s Pursuit of Saul Landau: Portrait of the Radical as a Young Man

Conclusion

Sujets

• Political Process
• Political Science
• 20th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Misconduct
• Modern history
• Cold War
• True crime
• General officer
• Political corruption
• Espionage
• Julian Assange
• Philip Agee
• General
• Control
• Guerre froide
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• J. Edgar Hoover
• Corruption
• 9
• 11

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745346038
• Langue: English

Extrait

The American Surveillance State
Few writers have done more than David Price to drag the secret history of America out of the shadows and into the clarifying light of public scrutiny. In a nation obsessed with secrets, the biggest and darkest secret of all is the one Price exposes here: the deviously surreptitious-and often illegal-lengths our own government has gone to surveil and disrupt the daily lives of its own citizens.
-Jeffrey St. Clair, editor at CounterPunch and author of Born Under a Bad Sky
Wielding a finely-honed anthropological perspective and armed only with the Freedom of Information Act, David Price has spent decades of meticulous research in uncovering the sordid and often absurd history of American political surveillance. Rather than Orwell s fictional tales of Big Brother, his book makes extensive use of the files compiled by the FBI and its legions of informers to show how the realities of governmental monitoring and harassment impacted on the lives of law-abiding women and men whose words and deeds were deemed to threaten dominant power structures in American society.
-Michael Seltzer, Professor Emeritus at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
U.S. intelligence agencies have expanded their grip to the point that now, as never before, millions of Americans accept surveillance as a normal part of everyday life. In this meticulously-researched book, David H. Price relentlessly dissects the history of the American surveillance state, from the Palmer Raids to the Snowden Files and beyond. Price s razor-sharp analysis exposes the malignant tissue connecting America s spy agencies to the forces of capital. Citizen-scholarship at its finest!
-Roberto J. Gonz lez, Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at San Jos State University

First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press Inc.
1930 Village Center Circle, Ste. 3-384, Las Vegas, NV 89134
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright David H. Price 2022
The right of the David H. Price to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4602 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4601 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4604 5 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4603 8 EPUB


This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Codenames
Introduction: Contextualizing Old Patterns and New Shifts in American Surveillance
PART I THE LONG VIEW: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF AMERICAN SURVEILLANCE
1. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI s Institutionalization of Surveillance
2. Memory s Half-life: Notes on a Social History of Wiretapping in America
3. The New Surveillance Normal: Government and Corporate Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism
PART II LANTING THOSE WITH A COMMUNIST TAINT
4. The Dangers of Promoting Peace during Times of Cold War: Gene Weltfish, the FBI, and the 1949 Waldorf Astoria s Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace
5. Tribal Communism under Fire: Archie Phinney and the FBI
6. The FBI s History of Undermining Legal Defenses: From Jury Panel Investigations to Defense Lawyer Surveillance Programs
7. Agents of Apartheid: Ruth First and the FBI s Historical Role of Enforcing Inequality
PART III MONITORING PIONEERS AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
8. How the FBI Spied on Edward Said
9. Seymour Melman and the FBI s Persecution of the Demilitarization Movement
10. Traces of FBI Efforts to Deport a Radical Voice: On Alexander Cockburn s FBI File
11. Medium Cool : Decades of the FBI s Surveillance of Haskell Wexler
12. Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI s Historical Reliance on Phone Company Criminality
13. The FBI and Candy Man: Monitoring Fred Haley, a Voice of Reason during Times of Madness
14. David W. Conde, Lost CIA Critic and Cold War Seer
PART IV POLICING GLOBAL INEQUALITY
15. E.A. Hooton and the Biosocial Facts of American Capitalism
16. Walt Whitman Rostow and FBI Attacks on Liberal Anti-Communism
17. Andr Gunder Frank, the FBI, and the Bureaucratic Exile of a Critical Mind
18. Angel Palerm and the FBI: Monitoring a Voice of Independence at the Organization of American States
19. The FBI s Pursuit of Saul Landau: Portrait of the Radical as a Young Man
Conclusion: Unbroken Chain-Connecting Seven Decades of American Surveillance and Harassment of Progressives Activists, Visionaries, and Intellectuals
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
This book documents the workings of the American surveillance state while examining how new forms of surveillance fit into a long history of American political surveillance. The U.S. government has long monitored and interfered with the freedom of thought and dissent-this history shows a great continuity that connects themes of political surveillance and oppression from the 1930s to the present. These forms of political oppression have always been a significantly underacknowledged function of the FBI.
Each chapter draws on government documents from the FBI and other agencies, released to me under the Freedom of Information Act, to examine impacts and trajectories of government surveillance on American society. The chapters in the book s four parts examine the form, functions, and outcomes of surveillance of individuals struggling to live free lives in a society whose secret police judged them and their ideas as threatening the public good; judgments rarely based on evidence of specific laws being violated, and frequently tied to the perceived threats these dissidents presented to the rich and powerful. In many instances, this public good the FBI claimed was threatened were the private economic interests of elites profiting from the stratified system threatened by these individuals. The American Surveillance State explores how the FBI, NSA, and CIA s political judgments have limited intellectual debates in American society. I use an anthropological lens to connect these surveillance campaigns with the latent and manifest features of the larger culture in which they were embedded, while critically examining how these select uses of state power reveal connections between these manifestations of America s secret surveillance apparatus and larger forces of political economy.
The book s parts explore four elements of contemporary state surveillance systems. The first part provides an historical and theoretical context for understanding the development of centralized surveillance systems in the United States, with special focus on the public s long resistance to these intrusive developments, and on efforts to socialize this public into accepting previously unthinkable levels of surveillance. I consider both individuals (like J. Edgar Hoover) and agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc.) birthing and supporting the surveillance state, but my primary focus remains the political economic structures within the American capitalist military industrial economy that nurture and profit from these limitations to freedom.
The second part analyzes a series of Cold War era FBI files documenting the FBI s routine spying on law-abiding citizens and organizations who threatened the institutions supporting American social, racial, and economic inequality. As a law enforcement agency disproportionately representing the interests of American elites, one of the FBI s historical functions has been to monitor, harass, and police deviant individuals who, while breaking no laws, publicly argue against social formations that empower a small group of elites and victimize the many who have little access to power. When these FBI investigations become publicly known, sometimes the stigma causes the subjects of these investigations to be lanted, or marked in ways making them less desirable to others. 1
The book s third part uses the investigatory files of several outspoken divergent individuals to consider the forms of surveillance undertaken against them. These individuals include prominent public intellectuals, a journalist, a phone phreak, and a community organizer. While the political projects of these individuals were significantly different, the similarities of the FBI s campaigns of surveillance and harassment reveal common tactics in which the FBI s surveillance is shown to be state efforts to alter or suppress political activities of individuals threatening the status quo. That such campaigns were routine but hidden features of twentieth century American political life prefigures many of the themes now present in post-9/11 America and this continuity should heighten concerns with current expanded uses of surveillance.
The final part examines the FBI s files on two important twentieth century economists, Walt Rostow and Andr Gunder Frank, whose explanations of the distribution of global wealth and poverty dramatically clashed with each other. Rostow s Modernization Theory claimed that development programs from the North would transform the global South into rich nations, while Gunder Frank s Dependency Theory showed how programs such as those advocated by Rostow did not improve the economic fate of recipients, and increased debt and dependence. Yet, despite the differences in these political projects, their FBI files show Hoover s rampant paranoia drove intrusive investigations of both these intellectuals. Other chapters in this section document the FBI taking on roles policing global inequality, as it monitored anthropologist Angel Palerm at the Organization of American Stat