The U.S. government has been caught red-handed spying on student, antiwar, and other groups that oppose Washington’s foreign policy. Recent disclosures show that federal cops have filed reports branding organizations a “potential threat” to the Department of Defense for expressing disagreement with or sponsoring protests against U.S. government policy.

What better proof that the U.S. rulers’ “antiterrorism” measures are aimed at the political rights of the vast majority? Working people should loudly oppose this government attack on the Bill of Rights.

The claim, after these facts came to light, by the chief of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity that they “fixed” the problem was simply another cover-up.

The U.S. rulers have been working hard over the last decade and a half to win acceptance for expanding the use of their secret police. In the 1970s, working people won greater political space through the battles for Black freedom, the fight for women’s rights, and the movement against the U.S. war on Vietnam. The impact of those struggles, coupled with Washington’s defeat in Vietnam and the resulting Watergate scandal, helped expose some of the government’s assaults on constitutional rights. The rulers decided to cut their losses and shore up the credibility of their police agencies. That was the meaning of the 1975-76 Senate Church Committee reports. The related hearings focused public attention on the use of snoops, provocateurs, wiretaps, and “black bag jobs” by the FBI and other cop agencies against opponents of government policies. These practices did not end, but cops had to use them more surreptitiously and accept some formal constraints.

In recent years, under the banner of the “war on terrorism,” U.S. officials have been pushing to loosen such restrictions. They seek to institutionalize wiretapping without even the fig leaf of a warrant, increase federal centralization of “surveillance” of “suspected terrorists,” establish a de facto national identity card system in the guise of Social Security numbers, expand “security” controls at airports, and promote appeals to report “suspicious” packages or behavior in public places.

What are the main rationalizations used by the U.S. rulers and their political representatives, Democrats and Republicans? Some intrusions of privacy are required of “us all” to face “terrorists” imperiling hearth and home. Civil liberties must be “balanced” against “national security.” That was the main argument the government used in its defense during a lawsuit the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance filed in 1973 against FBI spying and disruption, actions a federal court declared unconstitutional in 1986.

Behind today’s “homeland security” offensive and creeping militarization of civilian life is the realization by the billionaires who rule the United States that capitalism has a entered a long winter of economic depression and war. They are preparing to use rougher methods against working people who resist the effects of the crisis of the profit system.

Working people need to defend our hard-won political rights in order to protect ourselves against assaults by the employers and their state. Oppose all government domestic spying and disruption operations!
 
 
Related articles:
Federal court extends prison sentence for Palestinian rights backer Al-Arian
U.S. gov’t caught spying on peace groups  
 
 
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