Media Musings: Who will FBI keep files on now?
Ring.
“Hello, FBI, agent Smart speaking. May I help you?
“Ah, yeah, ah I want to report about a neighbor of mine. She’s a really odd student and she’s always talking about how much she hates President Bush and she reads these books all the time. She’s no patriot. No flag or nothing and she’s got really ugly anti-Bush posters and things in her dorm room.”
“Have you seen the posters yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen the titles of the books?”
“No.”
“Does she talk about hurting the President some way?”
“No, just that she wants him out of office.”
And so from there it would go. The quiet whisper of the informant in the ever-willing ear of the FBI’s agent. The informant will be back with us as he and she were in the McCarthy years, when J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI attacked the civil liberties of thousands of Americans and set up files on the basis of rumor and unsupported allegations.
You probably want this conversation to be only a possible extreme example but the knock really did come on the dorm room door of a real student and the FBI wanted to see her room and the posters. After they looked at them – attacks on Bush’s record on capital punishment in Texas and the death penalty – they announced there was “nothing there” and left.
Or, did they really? Did they make a file? Did they add her name to a data bank of potential subversives? We will never know.
And that’s what’s wrong with the seizure of new powers for the FBI by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller. If you question this power grab, ignoring that laws already give the FBI the power to go to public meetings and rallies on the basis of a tip, you are seeing the potential for abuses abound.
Let’s put it on the table: the FBI can now run full investigations on individuals for a year without any evidence of a crime. They can go into the interiors of our lives deeper than ever before including your magazine subscriptions, the books you take out of the local library, your charge accounts, pharmaceutical records, and all of your mortgages and income tax returns.
Beyond that, it’s the role of the angry informer who will be able to not only gain access to the FBI but also to do great harm. It’s amazing how the media have allowed, in most instances, to let Ashcroft get away with that lame “don’t worry about the bad, old days.” Well, there is more opportunity now than in “the bad, old days” to gather libelous and slanderous information in the names of national security and the prevention of terrorism than during the worst days of Hoover.
Hopefully the major media will take the time to revisit what the FBI became: a dark, brooding world of lies and half-truths and surveillance tapes packed in thousands of files on Presidents, Cabinet members, and everybody from Frank Sinatra to John Lennon and Charlie Chaplin. Hoover’s unlimited power forced Presidents to keep him as FBI head for his whole life.
This isn’t just bad, old days; it was an odd police state. Now we are told by Ashcroft and Mueller these new measures are sound patriotic expansions necessary to protect us. Yet none of these steps address the stunning failures of bureaucratic arrogance and non-communication at the very heart of the pre-Sept. 11 debacle.
Add to this an unwillingness of so many major media to open up a national dialogue on privacy and the Bush Administration’s draconian belief in secrecy and you have a situation that is so perilous to personal freedom it can only make one shudder.
Let’s leave it with a question: If Ashcroft is so secure in his belief personal freedoms are as protected today as there were two weeks ago, why is it he won’t meet with civil liberty advocates and lawyers to discuss the obvious implications of his decision? The answer is rather obvious, isn’t it?
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)