Stop living in the past. J. Edgar Hoover is dead.
by digby
The president has said many times that we should be comfortable with secret government surveillance because the people who run the programs are serious professionals whose only mission is to keep the nation safe from its enemies.
The celebrated writer William Vollmann has revealed that the FBI once thought he might be the Unabomber, the anthrax mailer and a terrorist training with the Afghan mujahideen.
In the September issue of Harper’s magazine, Vollmann describes the alarming and ludicrous contents of his 785-page secret government file, 294 pages of which he obtained after suing the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. Spiked with sarcasm directed at what he sees as the agencies’ arrogance, presumptuousness and ineptitude, his Harper’s essay, “Life As a Terrorist,” is inflamed with moral outrage at the systemic violation of his privacy. “I begin to see how government haters are made,” he writes.
A winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Vollmann is considered one of the most insightful writers in the world on the subject of violence and war.
[…]“Reading one’s FBI file is rarely pleasant,” Vollmann writes. He discovered that someone — Vollmann gives him the codename “Ratfink” — turned him in to the authorities as a possible Unabomber suspect because of the content of his fiction. His file claims that “anti-growth and anti-progress themes persist throughout each VOLLMANN work.” In this case, his accuser was referring to “Fathers and Crows,” a novel “set mostly in Canada in the seventeenth century.” Even more conclusive, the FBI observed ominously that “UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN has pride of authorship and insists his book be published without editing.”
What more evidence do we need!?
It’s hard to decide if we should be more concerned about what he describes as the agency’s nefariousness or its stupidity. Vollmann notes that the FBI couldn’t determine his Social Security number because it spelled his name wrong. His file incorrectly claims that he owns a flamethrower. (“I would love to own a flamethrower,” he writes.) It erroneously records him traveling to Beirut. In 1995, he was labeled “ARMED AND DANGEROUS.”
He makes hand-made art books.
After 9/11 they suspected him of being the anthrax killer too.
I suppose it’s always possible that the “culture” of the NSA is so totally different than the FBI that his could never happen with their information. Or, it’s also possible that when the FBI comes to the NSA with “suspicions” of terrorism, the NSA and the FISA court are only to happy to help them out by dipping into the vast stores of personal data they’re collecting on — everyone.
Either way, the point is that we already have citizens being stalked by the US government on the most specious grounds. And now we have given them exceptional technical abilities to do even more of it all under the guise of counter-terrorism. To just “trust” them, when they have a track record like what we see above is completely daft.
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