Authored by Jim Bovard via The Libertarian Institute,
On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, former CIA chief John Brennan announced on television that federal intelligence agencies “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” various suspect groups, specifically mentioning libertarians.
Libertarians are in the federal crosshairs. Six or seven years ago, there was a lot of prattle about how “the libertarian moment has arrived.” I always knew that was hokum. Since then, there has been a huge increase in hostility to libertarians in Washington DC and elsewhere around the country.
Many libertarians assume they have nothing to fear because they are not engaged in seeking to violently overthrow the government. But the feds will be able to find many other pretexts to target peaceful citizens with supposedly subversive ideas. Federal law already defines “domestic terrorism” far more broadly than most people realize. As the Oregonian recently noted, “Cases categorized as domestic terrorism include allegations of…knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted [government] building or grounds…civil disorders and making threatening communications.” FBI chief Christopher Wray told a Senate Committee that the FBI has 2,000 ongoing domestic terrorism investigations. Wray recognizes the terrorist peril as the ticket to a bigger budget: “We need more agents; we need more analysts.”
The Biden administration is itching for a broad new domestic terrorism law to enable even more crackdowns. Libertarians need to recognize how that definition of terrorism has already mushroomed. Capitol Police acting chief Yogananda Pittman, testifying to Congress, described the January 6 clash at the Capitol as “a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists.” Apparently, anyone who tromped from Trump’s raging speech to the Capitol that day was a terrorist, or at least an “insurrectionist” (“terrorist” spelled with more letters?).
After the clash at the Capitol on January 6, the de facto definition of terrorism seems to be “anything that frightens politicians.” Will we find out too late that the new de facto definition of “domestic terrorist” is “individuals who distrust the feds and own two guns and more than 100 bullets”?
Another codeword for who the feds will target is “extremists.” The Washington Post in January portrayed “domestic extremists” as “a disease that seems to have taken hold in the nation’s nervous system.” Last fall, FBI boss Wray told Congress that among the “underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism” are “perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach.” Libertarians are practically defined by their perception of government as overreaching. After the January 6 clash, Wray portrayed more busts as proof of FBI triumphs: “The more of the arrests that you see, well, that’s obviously good news for everybody that we’re arresting people who need to be arrested.”
In the coming years, the feds may treat libertarians like Muslims were treated after 9/11. Any new crackdown on terrorism will turn into a numbers game in which justice and fair play don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Between 2001 and 2006, federal prosecutors charged 10 times as many people in terrorism investigations as they convicted on terrorism-related charges. President Bush declared in 2005 that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted.” But only 39 people were convicted on crimes tied to terrorism or national security, a Washington Post analysis found.
Entrapment opened the floodgates to federal terrorism indictments. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. In 2006, the FBI fabricated a terror scheme by the Liberty City Seven, where an informant encouraged a bunch of dimwits in Florida to babble about blowing up government buildings. That group was so knuckle-headed that they asked the FBI informant for military uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade.
Few Americans recognize how badly the legal playing field is tilted against them. When FBI agents knock on their doors, many Americans won’t hesitate to open up because they assume “those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.” But the FBI is exploiting a sweeping law that criminalizes casual comments. Federal agents have the right to lie to you and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word (“no” or “yes”) false utterance to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
It gets worse. You don’t have to actually lie. FBI agents can fabricate the sentences they use to hang you. Unlike most law enforcement agencies, the FBI rarely videotapes interviews, thereby permitting agents to create the narrative or “facts” which then can be used to charge individuals with false statements. Instead of a transcript, an FBI agent writes up a memo a day or two later asserting what you said. FBI agents have been taught that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth,” which helps explain the vast increase in federal entrapment operations.
If the FBI shows up at your door, they might have already accessed every email and text message you sent in recent years. They may have vacuumed all your social media activity—those private Facebook messages you sent—HA! They may have also accessed all your credit card and other financial data. And the FBI may have already interrogated other people to squeeze out accusations against you that they can throw in your face. Then they launch into a game of 20 questions—with a federal indictment awaiting if they claim you answered untruthfully.
Politicians in Washington don’t see such abuses as a problem; instead, they are a grand opportunity to smite people who don’t kowtow. It wasn’t that long ago—in the final 15 years of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign—that the FBI became America’s thought police. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy marriages with poison pen letters, and to cripple or destroy leftist, black, white racist, and anti-war organizations. A 1976 Senate report warned, “The American people need to be assured that never again will a federal agency be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” But legal and administrative restrictions on the FBI evaporated in the post 9/11 panic, resulting in pervasive abuses of Americans’ rights.
The FBI now operates with near-total impunity. The same is true of many state and local police departments who may be hungering for new federal subsidies to crackdown on the extremist peril.
How might this play out in the daily lives of people guilty of entertaining libertarian ideas? Consider Duncan Lemp, a 21-year-old Maryland man who was shot to death in a predawn raid in March 2021 after police smashed in his bedroom window and tossed flash bang grenades into his bedroom. Lemp was active on Twitter and liked several tweets by Libertarian presidential candidate John McAfee. Lemp’s last tweet declared, “The Constitution is dead.” Two months later, so was Lemp.
The Montgomery County, Maryland government later admitted that Lemp was targeted in part because was “anti-government” and “anti-police”. Plus, Lemp was outspoken about his support of the Second Amendment and posted photos of himself with guns on Instagram. Police saw one such photo and concluded that Lemp possessed a semi-automatic rifle that was illegal to own in Maryland. After they killed him and searched the Lemp home, they realized they had mis-identified the firearm—it was legal. But police, prosecutors, and local politicians treated that like a harmless paperwork error: nobody cared about the wrongful killing of Duncan Lemp.
The police case against Lemp also came from accusations from one or more confidential informants. Lemp trusted people who betrayed him to the police, allegedly with false accusations according to Lemp family lawyer, Rene Sandler. A month after Lemp was killed, activists held a protest at Montgomery County Police headquarters. I attended that event as a journalist (the ol’ press pass flopping around my neck) and was chagrined to see how the event went down. Guys in Hawaii-style “Boogaloo” shirts were using bullhorns to scream profanities at cops and were pointlessly blocking a road. One of the most prominent organizers told attendees to bring firearms to the event, despite Maryland law prohibiting firearms at protests. He told people on Facebook to show up with their guns anyhow and just walk around, pretending not to be part of the demonstration. That guy was full of bluster but never showed up for the protest himself. Almost 10% of the 30 protesters were arrested for firearms or other offenses. I later heard that one of the guys suspected of being a police informant against Lemp was at that rally pretending to demand justice for Lemp.
In the coming months and years, many libertarians could be indicted not for violent acts against the government but for unwise or reckless words uttered in proximity to government informants. If you don’t know someone like the back of your hand, then you better be damn careful what you say around them. And even if you know a person well, that doesn’t oblige you to join them in a leap off a legal cliff. Simply because someone spouts anti-government zeal doesn’t make them more trustworthy than a congressman. Claire Wolfe, the author of 101 Things to Do Until the Revolution, wrote an excellent guide to recognizing government informants which she made available for free online.
Simple prudence can suffice to avoid many tripwires. If some new acquaintance wants to provide you a pipe bomb to help “make a statement,” he probably isn’t a real friend. There was a saying among antiwar activists in the 1960s and 1970s that the person who most fervently advocates violence is likely the undercover government agent. Activists should also recognize the likelihood that they could be surveilled online or in person. Parler was supposed to be a secure alternative to other online venues but millions of its messages were leaked earlier this year.
The answer is not to shut up and sure as hell not to cease fighting for your rights and liberties. Friends of freedom need to continue valiantly and peacefully championing their ideas. At some point, more Americans will finally recognize the folly of permitting politicians and government agents to capture vast unchecked power over everyone else. In the meantime, prudent libertarians will avoid writing anything in an email that they don’t want to hear read out loud in federal court.
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First, they came for the Libertarians after they had already cornered and shackled the Judges.
The FBI was constructor to be an empire. Consider Biden to be the “new” J. Edgar.\
https://theconversation.com/j-edgar-hoovers-oversteps-why-fbi-directors-are-forbidden-from-getting-cozy-with-presidents-78896
1972
May 02
J. Edgar Hoover dies, ending a five-decade era at the FBI
After nearly five decades as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover dies, leaving the powerful government agency without the administrator who had been largely responsible for its existence and shape.
Educated as a lawyer and a librarian, Hoover joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and within two years had become special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Deeply anti-radical in his ideology, Hoover came to the forefront of federal law enforcement during the so-called “Red Scare” of 1919 to 1920. The former librarian set up a card index system listing every radical leader, organization, and publication in the United States and by 1921 had amassed some 450,000 files. More than 10,000 suspected communists were also arrested during this period, but the vast majority of these people were briefly questioned and then released. Although the attorney general was criticized for abusing his authority during the so-called “Palmer Raids,” Hoover emerged unscathed, and on May 10, 1924, he was appointed acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, a branch of the Justice Department established in 1909.
During the 1920s, with Congress’ approval, Director Hoover drastically restructured and expanded the Bureau of Investigation. He built the corruption-ridden agency into an efficient crime-fighting machine, establishing a centralized fingerprint file, a crime laboratory, and a training school for agents. In the 1930s, the Bureau of Investigation launched a dramatic battle against the epidemic of organized crime brought on by Prohibition. Notorious gangsters such as George “Machine Gun” Kelly and John Dillinger met their ends looking down the barrels of Bureau-issued guns, while others, like Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the elusive head of Murder, Incorporated, were successfully investigated and prosecuted by Hoover’s “G-men.” Hoover, who had a keen eye for public relations, participated in a number of these widely publicized arrests, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, as it was known after 1935, became highly regarded by Congress and the American public.
With the outbreak of World War II, Hoover revived the anti-espionage techniques he had developed during the first Red Scare, and domestic wiretaps and other electronic surveillance expanded dramatically. After World War II, Hoover focused on the threat of radical, especially communist, subversion. The FBI compiled files on millions of Americans suspected of dissident activity, and Hoover worked closely with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy, the architect of America’s second Red Scare.
In 1956, Hoover initiated Cointelpro, a secret counterintelligence program that initially targeted the U.S. Communist Party but later was expanded to infiltrate and disrupt any radical organization in America. During the 1960s, the immense resources of Cointelpro were used against dangerous groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, but also against African American civil rights organizations and liberal anti-war organizations. One figure especially targeted was civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who endured systematic harassment from the FBI.
By the time Hoover entered service under his eighth president in 1969, the media, the public, and Congress had grown suspicious that the FBI might be abusing its authority. For the first time in his bureaucratic career, Hoover endured widespread criticism, and Congress responded by passing laws requiring Senate confirmation of future FBI directors and limiting their tenure to 10 years. On May 2, 1972, with the Watergate affair about to explode onto the national stage, J. Edgar Hoover died of heart disease at the age of 77. The Watergate affair subsequently revealed that the FBI had illegally protected President Richard Nixon from investigation, and the agency was thoroughly investigated by Congress. Revelations of the FBI’s abuses of power and unconstitutional surveillance motivated Congress and the media to become more vigilant in future monitoring of the FBI.
READ MORE: J. Edgar Hoover: His Life and Legacy
Citation Information
Article Title
J. Edgar Hoover dies, ending a five-decade era at the FBI
Author
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/end-of-an-era-at-the-fbi
Access Date
April 25, 2021
Publisher
© 2021 A&E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The women DURING the WWII had their heads shaved for the first offense and were killed for the second in Poland. This was to dissuade the population’s willingness to work with the Nazis. Men were outright killed.
In times of “peace” we cannot do so because the government has ways to “peacefully” put us in prison for it.
Basically the rules of how to recognize a snitch also kind of say: do ot do anything illegal. This is a good advice during the so called peace but it all changes when there is a shooting war.
I think that if a group protests peacefully and nothing else, they still may be accused now and go to jail or be killed by the snitches. When there is so much fear about the snitches nobody simply should organize, unless they know a person(s) from their childhood and even then it’s a risk.
So one thing that the article doesn’t say is how to organize, successfully. I think that there are cartels out there that are impossible ,or nearly impossible to infiltrate successfully but they kill people left and right and unfortunately kill even more innocent people for a mere suspicion of being a snitch. This isn’t a tactic for the peacetime groups.
Any Polish resistance (that at the end was very successful at ending the Socialist regime) during the Soviets is something to look at. These people did many illegal, at the time, things and hundreds of thousands of them died in the process. But they won because 1/30th of the country joined the opposition and were thus impossible to canvass successfully. I kind of think that this has to happen in the US as well, to end this system of oppression and end it now, before the system gets stronger. And all of the patriots considering joining a group to actually do something should recognize that they have a high chance of being jailed or killed due to the snitches in their group. I don’t think that can be helped as any patriot group that kills innocents for a mere suspicion of being a snitch can achieve anything great.
I was a “member” in good standing of a group about ten years ago in Oklahoma. I wonder if I am still on that list?
Am betting I am.
…”Simple prudence can suffice to avoid many tripwires.”…
…”The answer is not to shut up and sure as hell not to cease fighting for your rights and liberties.”…
This guy needs to decide what side of the fence he’s on.
The key to self preservation these days is stealth… fly under the radar, if the FBI ever comes … “knocking on your door” … you have fucked up big time and probably have been for some time.
Nobody can change what’s coming but you can get yourself in deep shit trying.
Accept then detach.
Its great confidence that people like Sessions, Barr and Wray were placed in charge of **cough** justice. In the case of wray, still doing a marvey job…
Damn people – what’s the first rule of Fight Club?
Were there more than one?
Yes… Rule#2 – See rule #1
FBI – KGB Same 3-letter agency, just spelled differently.
Its to bad the Libertarians can’t get their shytes together. Politically I lean heavily towards Libertarian and joined the Libertarian Party here in British Communista about 5 years ago.
Attended AGM’s and was invited to higher level leadership meets. It was an eye opener. Zero strategy, all over the map in terms of ‘policy’ an zero cohesiveness in ‘leadership’. When Christy Clark stepped down I suggested the party throw everything in to capture that seat, as it would have been a very significant win. Because it was Kelowna and not Hongcouver so not gonna happen. Long story short the leadership didn’t like that I was not supportive of total anarchy and cut me from the list.
Funny thing is that the then leader emailed me about two months ago. Asked if I would buy another banner for an upcoming event, in hongcouver. lol… I think I may still respond. I’ll send the redirected check I was gonna sent Stucky, to him instead… priorities.
I ask people if they feel represented? The crazies in Washington seem to think they are overlords instead of public servants.
After watching the documentary “White Boy” about ‘White Boy Rick’ I can only conclude that the FBI has been full of low-IQ-evil people for decades. DECADES.
J. Edgar, Cocaine dumped into ghettos(assisted CIA), Whitey Bulger, Mueller, 9/11 John Patrick O’Neill. We can pick something out every decade of it’s existence.
Take for example the McMillion’s HBO doc that showed the McDonald’s lottery theft was but a sticky note on an investigator’s desk until Doug Matthews showed initiative.
I watched that too, great documentary , kind of like “Making of a Murderer”.
Poor Rick got used than kicked to the curb then framed and put away, all as a minor.
Goes to show you this country isn’t going to hell…it went there a looooong time ago.
You should never, ever speak to anyone in government. You have a right to remain silent, and you should always choose to use that right. All attorneys will always tell you to keep your mouth shut no matter what.
Wait! Does that mean that there might be some feds on this website stirring shit up? I wonder who that could be…🤔