To Protect and Surveil
How government agencies help officers first to the scene with what they’ve already seen
In the early 1900's, detective William J. Burns was the “Sherlock Holmes” of America.
Burns spent years infiltrating the Iron Workers union and their bombing campaign that had struck at manufacturing plants nationwide. Following the infamous Los Angeles Times bombing in 1910, Burns used his network of spies to collect intelligence from a drunken hunting escapade involving suspects Ortie McManigal and union secretary-treasurer John J. McNamara.
McManigal and J. B. McNamara (brother of secretary-treasurer JJ) were arrested on information. They were lied to, told by detectives that the two were suspected of a Chicago bank robbery earlier that day. Rather than being taken to jail, they instead were arraigned at the private home of Chicago Police Sergeant William Reed for seven days.
J. J. McNamara was arrested when Burns and detectives busted into an Iron Workers meeting in California. He was denied his council unlawfully by a state judge, then, in just 30 minutes, was ushered into the custody of Burns, who also had McManigal and J. B. illegally smuggled across state lines the same day.
Five score and five years later, landmark opinions handed down from the highest court of America in Gideon and Miranda further solidified the rights of the presumed innocent from accusation to conviction — or at least they are supposed to.
In a time where lines are blurred between right and wrong, privacy and security, military and police: everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed.
The police state has flourished beneath the overwhelming growth of three-lettered government intelligence agencies. The groundbreaking leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and subsequent reporting from publications like The Intercept, have merely exposed the tip of the iceberg that is the collect-it-all, dragnet panopticon of the National Security Agency (NSA) and programs like PRISM, X-KEYSCORE, and UPSTREAM (the inspiration of this aptly-named blog).
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has stockpiled 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition from no-bid, redacted business contracts, including (as FedBid reported) hollow-point ammunition deemed illegal for use in warfare by international law. Complementing the bullets was the delivery of an undetermined number of retrofitted ‘Mine Resistant Protected’ MaxxPro MRAP vehicles, many of which have been liquidated to local police forces in cities like Gainesville, FL with a population of 127, 500.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) single-handedly disrupted seventeen terror plots between 2001–2013, one-hundred percent of which were conceptualized, fomented, funded, and ultimately foiled by federal agents.
One of the most recent examples was Sami Osmankac:
Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go.
Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one (The Intercept).
The FBI has since been accused of surreptitiously aiding the NSA via SIGINT (signals intelligence) operations conducted by the Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU.
They’ve been accused of purchasing Cessna aircraft through registered shell-corporations, retrofitting them with advanced surveillance technology, to fly secret reconnaissance missions over organized dissenters and protest movements, distributing intel to policing units on the ground.
They’ve been accused of working with the Chicago Police Department to entrap minority and mentally-ill suspects, holding them at a secluded “black-site” in Homan Square.
These ‘Chicago-style’ tactics of policing and surveillance, like those from the days of William Burns and his questionable arraignment of the McNamara brothers, have only expanded under this Chicago-raised Administration.
If time has told us anything, it is that these actions will not cease on their own. Procedural expiration of surveillance powers has been allowed to lapse, yet the surveillance continues. Courts have struck down abuses against the presumed innocent, yet the interrogation has simply moved underground.
To assume that simple regulations and provisions will limit a government agenda that cares not to be regulated nor presided over, is to assume that these egregious examples of overreach will simply stop over time after they have in fact increased exponentially.
The question is not whether these surveillance programs will outlast their publicly intended functions, many already have. Instead, we should be asking how long it will be before the people collectively decide to stop it.
