Abuse of Authority

17 Dec 2003

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These excerpts should be useful to those attempting to understand the
FBI motivations regarding domestic control of cryptography.

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"The Secret War Against the Jews" by John Loftus and Mark Aarons
Pages 181 to 183.

  Several history books have recorded that American intelligence
agencies have conducted wiretaps against U.S. citizens without
warrants, but these allegations have concerned operations aimed
mostly at the left, particularly Communists and radical black groups.
Our sources say that the history books have missed the most important
elements of this story of the violation of democratic rights: the
systematic electronic eavesdropping employed against American Jews
engaged in legitimate political activities.  In this chapter we
discuss the following allegations:

  - During World II the covert British wiretap program in the United
States against Nazi sympathizers was extended to surveil American
supporters of a Jewish state in Palestine.

  - After the war this program was continued, and massively expanded,
as the British gained the cooperation of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal for the illegal collection of
electronic intelligence on Zionist activities in the United States.

  - The once highly secret Communications Intelligence arrangements
between Britain and the United States have been deliberately twisted
by the intelligence agencies of both countries to allow illegal
British wiretaps of American Jewish citizens using American
facilities.  A reciprocal arrangement exists in Britain.

  - The illegal campaign against the Jews reached its height during
the Reagan-Bush years in the White House, when even Jewish children in
summer camp were monitored for "subversive" activities.

  - Over the years this illegal arrangement has been extended past
Jews, Communists, and black radicals, to reach virtually any citizen,
including mainstream political candidates, no matter how harmless
their activities may have been.

The "old spies" say that electronic surveillance of Jews started in
1944, when American Zionists were first wiretapped on a broad scale.
The wiretaps were the product of secret wartime agreements between
British and American intelligence calling for long-term cooperation to
spy on each other's "subversive" citizens.  Since that time the
bugging of American and British Jews has never stopped.  In fact, the
wiretaps have been greatly expanded.
  Our sources, who include a former special agent of the FBI, a former
liaison to the NSA, several former NSA officials and employees, a
number of former consultants to both American and British intelligence
on communications security, and several former officers of the
U.S. Army Security Agency, make one point very clearly: <I>For the
last fifty years, virtually every Jewish citizen, organization, and
charity in the world has been the victim of electronic surveillance by
Great Britain, with the knowing and willing assistance of the
intelligence services of the United States.</I>
  This massive and systematic violation of both American and British
law has continued, with only slight interruptions, for nearly half a
century.  As will be seen later in Chapter 12, dealing with the
Liberty incident, electronic espionage has been the most deadly threat
to Israel's existence from its very inception.  It also has been the
most continuous criminal violation of the Fourth Amendment to the
U.S. Bill of Rights (sic).  Jews are not the only ethnic group to be
wiretapped at their homes or jobs, although, as we shall see, they are
the most frequent targets.
  To put it bluntly, no citizen is safe anymore.  Privacy is gone,
search warrants are meaningless, the protections of the courts and
constitutions have been overthrown entirely, without the knowledge or
consent of our legislatures, presidents, or prime ministers.  This
ugly corner of Western history has never been fully explored before.
It is, perhaps, the most shocking revelation of this book.  Because of
the sensitivity of this topic, we deal with it in some detail from the
beginning.
  Our sources' first thesis is simple.  It is not American
intelligence that mounted an intensive surveillance operation against
Ben-Gurion's arms purchases in the United States, and cut off this
promising source of weapons and equipment.  It was British
intelligence that wiretapped American Jewish citizens without warrants
and leaked the information to the FBI.  The truth is that the British
had been eavesdropping on the United States for a very long time.[2]
  The advent of British "electronic" espionage against American
citizens goes back to the end of World War I.  The British knew that
money and guns sent by Irish-Americans were making the difference in
the Republic of Ireland's war for independence against the British
Empire.  The British government compelled American telegraph companies
to hand over all message traffic, in order that it could obtain
intelligence on Irish nationalist and international Communist
activities and take appropriate countermeasures.
  As the heads of the Western Union and other telegraph corporations
revealed to a shocked Senate in 1920, the British were reading all
American telegrams.  Apparently, even official U.S. government
communications were included among the material handed over.[3] As a
result of these revelations, Congress passed a law making it a crime
to intercept telegraphic or diplomatic communications.  There the
matter rested, along with the false legend of Secretary of State Henry
Stimson's edict that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail."[4]
  Rested, that is, until the early years of World War II.  As
previously discussed, while the United States remained technically
neutral, the British secret service obtained Roosevelt's permission
for Sir William Stephenson to establish an illegal wiretap unit in New
York to spy on Americans who were aiding the Nazis.  As discussed in
Chapter 3, several of our sources say that Roosevelt also was using
the British wiretap team to dig up dirt on his political opponents.[5]

Pages 191 to 192:

  Hoover was one of the biggest customers of wiretap information from
its inception.  In fact, the FBI made no bones about its right to
listen in to domestic conversations without a warrant.  It wasn't
until a 1975 court case that the FBI was finally told that they had no
legal right to wiretap individuals or organizations without a warrant,
unless there was a proven "agency relationship" with a foreign power.
In fact, until the stricter 1975 standards, the FBI could wiretap or
place surveillance on any Jew who gave money to any Jewish
organization that supported Israel.  Here is an example of the type of
innocuous information that was forwarded to the FBI as a result of
their obsessive surveillance of American Jews:

  EMMA LAZARUS FOUNDATION OF JEWISH WOMENS CLUBS AMONG LARGER DONORS
  CONTRIBUTING $500 DURING A FUND RAISING DINNER HELD BY THE EMERGENCY
  CIVIL LIBERTIES COMMITTEE . . . [ON] DEC 15 1962 AT THE AMERICANA
  HOTEL NYC IN CELEBRATION OF THE 171ST ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL OF
  RIGHTS[43]

Apparently, Jews who celebrated the Bill of Rights were considered
potential, if not actual, subversives.  That remains FBI policy to
this day.  The FBI refused to accept the restrictions from an adverse
1975 court ruling and leaked its view to the media in a 1977 memo.
The FBI still defended its right to spy on person who "might" be
supporters of a foreign power, or even anyone in the country who
"might" be influenced by a foreign power.[44]

Pages 194 to 195:

  In 1982, shortly after President Reagan agreed to rescind the
Carter-era restrictions on domestic Communications Intelligence
operations, the FBI was asked to record all information on "potential"
Jewish subversives.  As one source wrote, the wiretapping had nothing
to do with Pollard: "the arrest of Pollard [in 1985] was used as a
pretext to expand a supposedly closed-down illegal covert operation by
the FBI called 'SCOPE' whose purpose was to compile lists of Jews in
government, research, and institutional leadership, et al.  This
operation was revealed publicly in 'The Wall Street Journal', January
17, 1992."[54]  This source believed that "The Wall Street Journal"
article was really an exercise in damage control, an attempt to shift
the blame back to James Jesus Angleton and conceal the ongoing
wiretapping.  While there is some dispute about when and why the
bugging resumed, the consensus of our sources is that the modern
version of Operation Gold is horrendous.  The FBI's collecting has
gone beyond the pale of what could be considered legitimate
intelligence gathering.
  In addition to rosters of major contributors to Israeli funds, the
Bureau has targeted the innocuous activities of children.  "It's just
gotten out of hand. . . . I saw FBI records where they collected lists
of kids going to Jewish summer camp."[55] Other government officials
who reviewed the FBI's "counterterrorist" program against American
Jews said that while they did not catch any terrorists, they collected
a lot of information on Jewish lobbyists.[56]
  Another NSA source alleged that the FBI had custody of the Jewish
surveillance files because a recent law made the FBI's
"counterterrorism" files completely exempt from the Freedom of
Information Act, under a special counterintelligence loophole.[57]
Under the FBI's broad definition of an espionage suspect, anyone who
communicates with a foreign government - for example, who calls a
relative in Israel or donates to a charity that sends funds to Israel
- - gets swept up in the electronic vacuum cleaner.  "Pollard paranoia"
swept through the intelligence community, brushing aside the Bill of
Rights.

Selected footnotes for Chapter 8, "Spying on Zion".

[2] Confidential interviews, former officer, the NSA; former special
agent, FBI, 1982-1989.

[3] "'In July 1919 . . . when British censorship ceased, we were
ordered by the British government to turn over to them all messages
passing between our own offices, 10 days after they were
sent. . . . they wanted these messages only for such supervision as
might give them an inkling of pending disorders within Great Britain,
I assume having to do with Irish unrest, and also to do with Bolshevik
propaganda.'
  "Asked by Senator Kellogg whether the messages turned over to
British intelligence included United States government communications,
the cable chief buckled.  'If you don't mind, I would not like to
answer that,' he pleaded.  'It puts my company in a very embarrassing
position with the British Government.'" James Bamford, "The Puzzle
Palace" (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), pp. 329-330.

[4] Ibid., p. 40.  As one [of] our sources, an expert on NSA history,
pointed out, Stimson did not make that remark at the time.  It first
appeared in a post-World War II biography.

[5] Confidential interviews, former NSA officer; former Special Agent,
FBI, 1982-1989.

[44] Bamford, "The Puzzle Palace", p. 297

[44] "The foreign influence thesis became a courtroom issue in the
Spring of 1977 with the Kearney wiretapping and mail interception
indictment [charges later dropped] based on FBI efforts to locate and
apprehend the Weather Underground fugitives.  A 400-page 'top secret'
report . . . was prepared by FBI researchers and leaked to the press
to establish that no crimes were committed because [of] inherent
executive power, unrestrained by legal or constitutional requirements.
The taps and mail interceptions, the report argued, were legitimate
counter-intelligence practices sanctioned by a reservation in the
Keith case, excluding targets with 'significant connections' with a
foreign power. . . . In June 1975, the vague language of Keith was
sharpened by an appellate court ruling (Zweiborn v. Mitchell) that
mere influence or support of a foreign power did not deprive a
domestic group of the protection of warrant requirements in the
absence of a showing of an actual agency relationship or
collaboration." Donner, "The Age of Surveillance", p. 279.

[54] Confidential source letter, January 7, 1993, p. 3.

[55] Confidential interview, agency withheld to prevent
identification.

[56] Confidential interviews, current and former officers in several
government agencies that liaise with the FBI, including but not
limited to Defense, State, and Justice departments.

[57] Confidential interview, former official, the NSA, 1990.

Abuse of Authority

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