I recently finished the book:



Theoharis, A. G. (2004). The FBI and American democracy: a brief critical history. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.



While I won't offer a full book review here, this is a well-documented, must-read book for anyone who still believes that needless governmental surveillance of innocent citizens unconnected to criminal activities is either non-existent, an aberration of the 1960s or a creation of the Bush Administration. This sort of clearly illegal activity has been documented as going on since the 1910s, through Presidents of both parties and up to the current day. The justifications have changed. But secrecy combined with a view of dissent as treason is a solid, bipartisan tradition. It's just more obvious now.



The reason I'm highlighting this book on FGI and not my personal blog is three-fold. First, Mr. Theoharis makes note of another book he wrote that should be valuable to people researching the FBI. It is called The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide ed Athan Theoharis with Tony G. Poveda, Susan Rosenfield, and Richard Gid Powers (Phoenix: Oryx, 1999). An annotated bibliography on pages 385-396 of that book lists articles, congressional hearings, books and microfilmed collections. Second, on pages 176-178 of "FBI and American Democracy", Theoharis has provided brief biographies of all the directors of the FBI through the present.



Thirdly, in his "Note on Sources" Theoharis offers extensive notes on his use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain materials for his history. Here is an excerpt that shows both the power and limitations of FOIA (p. 179-180):

First, researchers seeking FBI files must pay processing fees of ten cents per page. Given the volume of records created since the bureau's establishment in 1908, these costs effectively preclude any individual from being able to fund the acquisition of the millions of pages of relevant FBI records. Researching the history of the FBI requires a strategy of identifying the most important and representative files.



Second, while the FBI must release all records relating to a specific FOIA request, to make such records requests a researcher must know how FBI officials created and then maintained records. A requestor can identify the files of a named individual or organization but might not know the names of special code-named programs (COMPIC, COMRAP, ABSCAM). Furthermore all records pertaining to an identified individual or organization were not all filed and indexed under that individual's or organization's name. Some were maintained in the secret office files of senior FBI officials (and most of these office files have been destroyed). Others were maintained in other files, not all of which are cross-referenced in the FBI's index to its central file system. For example, the FBI's file on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) does not contain all records relating to the FBI-HUAC relationship. Some are extant in the FBI's files on Alger Hiss, others in the code-named COMPIC file -- and conceivably still others are included in the FBI's files on Richard Nixon, Robert Stripling, or other unknown code-named programs. Furthermore, in my effort to understand the relationship between the FBI and the Justice Department, I requested all FBI files on named attorney's general, but the released files offer limited insights. Conceivably this relationship can be understood by researching the files on both proposed and rejected prosecutions of major cases or otherwise unidentifiable files in the FBI's 66 (Administrative Matters) classification.

Another challenge identified by Theoharis is the apparent capriciousness in releasing materials:

"Having filed multiple FOIA requests, I have been struck by the variances in processing of the same report included in different files -- having information withheld in one case but not in another."

It seems like it shouldn't be this difficult and expensive for citizens to learn about their government's activities. But at least we're able to chip away at government abuses with FOIA.

It isn't often you see a discussion FOIA, FBI, NARA, and Records Retention Plan and Disposition Schedules in the popular press. This article describes the frustrations of one researcher when he discovered that records had been destroyed by the FBI.

• The Department of Forgetting: How an obscure FBI rule is ensuring the destruction of irreplaceable historical records, By Alex Heard, Slate, June 24, 2008.

The system's fundamentals make sense, I guess--very complicated sense--but to me the disturbing part comes at the end of the line. At some point 25 years after a case closes, a file that isn't marked "permanent" gets pulled and looked at by one or two people inside the FBI. There are no "knowledgeable representatives of the NARA" monitoring this crucial moment. If it's decided internally that the file isn't important, it's gone.

Michael Ravnitzky, an FOIA researcher based in the Washington, D.C., area, is no fan of the Records Retention Plan and likens it to an open-ended manual for strip-mining a priceless public record. "The FBI got a list of exceptional files given to them by historians, and they said, 'We'll keep that,' " he says. "We'll keep large files. Smaller files, we'll keep a sampling. Everything else gets tossed. That's what the plan is." Based on documents Ivan Greenberg obtained from the FBI, he estimates that 250 million pages were destroyed between 1986 and 1995.

Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project.

Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening!

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General has just released its report (PDF) (uploaded to the Internet Archive of course!) on the FBI’s involvement in detainee interrogations in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Reuters reports that the “Bush administration’s top security officials ignored FBI concerns” and that the “FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use. According to McClatchy News, The IG's report had been delayed in part because the Pentagon slow-rolled its review of the report for classified information.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration's top security officials ignored FBI concerns over the abusive treatment of terrorism suspects, which one agent called "borderline torture," a four-year Justice Department probe found.

The FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use, said the 370-page report released on Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Critics say the techniques employed by the CIA and U.S. military in questioning terrorism suspects captured after the September 11 attacks amounted to torture.

FBI agents participated interrogations and still do, but bureau Director Robert Mueller directed agents in 2002 not to participate in coercive questioning, the report said.

[Thanks Crooks and Liars!]

According to a news release from the ACLU, the U.S. Terrorist Screening Center has over 900,000 names in its Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. At that rate, the number of names in the database would exceed 1,000,000 names by the end of July, 2008.

The ACLU launched a watch list counter showing the number of new names supposedly added each day to the list, as well as a number of well-known people who have been put on the list.

Go to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center FAQ to learn who gets included in the TSDB and whether or not you can find out if you are in it (hint: you can't).

INTELWIRE has announced that they've obtained more than 1,700 pages of FBI documents that are cited in the endnotes of the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission. The documents were obtained by Intelwire under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents reveal many new details about the hijacker's movements, possible links between the hijackers and the government of Saudi Arabia, and connections to extremist figures in the United States, including blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. There is a wide variety of information, including the movements of the hijackers over more than 10 years, people who associated with the hijackers in the U.S., FBI interviews with the victims, transcripts of phone calls to the hijacked flights, intelligence obtained by overseas agencies. The documents are listed on the Intelwire website according to the chapter of the 9/11 Report in which they appeared. According to Intelwire, this may be the largest online repository of 9/11 source documents on the Web. Over the next several months these documents will also be posted individually and chronologically at INTELFILES.com with descriptive text, and additional comment and analysis as appropriate. Please note that the documents have been heavily redacted. A chronologically ordered package is available to researchers, including multiple copies of documents with different redactions.

According to today's NY TImes, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 - 1972, sent a plan on July 7, 1950 to President Truman to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty, saying that mass arrests were necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.   

As everyone knows, wikipedia has been in the news recently because several large corporations got caught scrubbing their wikipedia entries -- Wired is keeping track of the most shameful wikipedia spin jobs. Well now it's been shown that the CIA and FBI has gotten in on the act. Anyone got the time to use Wikiscanner to see what other government agencies are scrubbing their wiki images?

A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Use of National Security Letters (199 pages, 36MB) U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General March 2007

Other copies: PDF at Washington Post, and a compressed version of only 12 meg at FAS; and an html version at cryptome

Happy holidays all! I thought you'd get a kick out of the following:

Wise Bread noted that the FBI considered "It's a wonderful Life" -- one of the most tear-inducing films ever IMHO!! -- to be communist propoganda.

Unfortunately, Wise Bread only linked to two pages of the more than 2,000 pages in the FBI's Communist Infiltration- Motion Picture Industry (COMPIC) FOIA file, but I left a comment to point readers there as well as to let them know about the FBI's FOIA Reading Room.

File 10a has a list of films from 12/31/55 (this was a running memo from 1942 - 1958!) which include such subversive titles like A Song to Remember (bio of Chopin), Buck Privates Come Home (abbott & Costello), Keeper of the Flame (Tracy & Hepburn) and Salt of the Earth, the only film ever actually banned in the US, but later deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

BoingBoing has more background on HUAC and the blacklisting of many directors, actors, and writers.