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New World War: Revolutionary Methods for Political Control

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Volume I: Current Political Situation


Volume II: The New War


Volume III: Weapons of The New War


Volume IV: The Coverup


Appendix


The Investigation
What Surveillance Really Means

The use of this technology to attack people is justified by an investigation where the targeted individual or group is placed under surveillance. Despite the evidence that surfaced about COINTELPRO and recent media announcements that the military is targeting citizens, this has been going on in some form since the early 1900s.

The investigation can be the result of any information linking an individual or group to subversion or extremism. In some cases the information is brought to the investigating organization by an informant or local police. There may be a preliminary investigation to determine whether a full-scale investigation is necessary.

After an investigation has been launched, a process of intelligence gathering occurs, which includes the subject being placed under 24/7 electronic surveillance, which may be conducted from fixed locations or mobile units. Information obtained through surveillance is evaluated in relation to the purpose of those conducting the investigation.

According to Frank J. Donner, author of The Age of Surveillance and former director of the American Civil Liberties Union Project on Political Surveillance, the intelligence process, which includes surveillance, can have passive or aggressive traits. While the passive method is typically less intrusive, both have punitive features.

Aggressive intelligence (also referred to as active or overt intelligence) is specifically designed to damage or harass the target. It is a faction of the state administration, says Donner, which exists to monitor, punish, and frustrate people in an extra-judicial manner. Those whose activities are seen as undesirable are singled out and attacked.

The agents who conduct these investigations are typically recruited on the basis of their social and political conformity. They have been described as ideological zealots and see themselves as the front line of protection against subversion. The investigations they conduct are said to impact them personally. They may become angry at their targets and behave antagonistic toward them.

The information gathered includes: vehicle records, social security records, voter records, private records such as those from credit agencies, bank statements, insurance documents, car rental agency information, employment applications, court trial information, automobile information, and personal information from the subject’s home such as reading material, address books, and other information.

It also includes interviews with the subjects, which are done to intimidate them and get them to stop their activities. Others interviewed include the target’s friends, relatives, neighbors, and teachers, as well as businesses and services which they use.

Beginning in the 1940s agents found they could influence employers, landlords, police departments, and government agencies by subtly suggesting that the individual under investigation was engaged in subversive activities. This typically resulted in the destruction of people’s careers, home evictions, etc.

A variety of harassment techniques are used during the investigation as well. This includes entries into people’s homes using unobtrusive access, tailgating, the use of informants, verbal abuse, IRS audits, insults, pranks, summons to jury duty, and communications interception to interfere with dialog between the subject and organizations or individuals.

Investigations of this kind last decades or indefinitely. The investigation is indefinite because it is not intended to gather information for a future legal proceeding. Instead, it is a justification for the state to legally attack a group or individual using its multitude of resources. The investigation is done for the single purpose of damaging people.

Because this type of investigation is covert, and due to the vagueness of the mental and emotional injuries inflicted, it is difficult to prove in a court of law. Even when some portions are provable, a successful lawsuit to halt the activities is unlikely.

History of Military Surveillance

The military’s surveillance of civilians can be traced back to at least 1917. In its Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics report of 1973, the US Senate commented: “Military surveillance of civilian politics in the United States is as old as the Army intelligence itself.”

During WWI civilians who were suspected of being German spies, or simply not patriotic enough, were placed under surveillance by the Army and Navy. Although its intensity varied thereafter, it continued throughout WWII with the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), then into the Cold War and the 1960s with the Military Intelligence Group (MIG).

In 1939, the FBI along with the Military Intelligence Division (MID) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) continued to conduct investigations on civilians who were thought to be subversive. One organization that had been placed under surveillance for over 50 years was a pacifist Quaker organization known as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).

Although the group was claimed to have been subversive, FBI files beginning in 1942 repeatedly concluded that it was a sincere pacifist group, free of subversion. However, the military, CIA, and IRS, along with local police, continued to monitor (harass) the group. Citizen informants were used to infiltrate the group. In addition to the group itself being placed under surveillance, its individual members were surveilled and harassed.

College campuses became the focal point of federal and military intelligence units during the 1950s. The FBI began infiltrating campuses during loyalty-security programs which it used to check potential applicants for government employment.

This allowed them to conduct investigations on students, during which time agents developed connections with professors, deans, registrars, and secretaries who furnished information. At this time the FBI recruited informants on campuses including students, operators, postal workers, landlords, dormitory maids, maintenance people, etc., who watched people for the agency.

Also beginning in the 1950s, the CIA developed ties to college campuses using academic research programs as front groups. One included the National Student Association, a nationwide group of college students created to support certain policies.

Others were the Independent Research Service, the International Student Conference, Policy Research Incorporated, the American Society for African Cultures, and the International Development Foundation.

The CIA would regularly recruit as informants the students and faculty members of these groups, which received funds from sources funded by the CIA. The CIA also recruited faculty and students as an investment protection method to monitor other students and faculty working on projects that they were funding.

The Military Intelligence Group (MIG) was on college campuses in the 1950s as well. Students and faculty were placed under active surveillance by the military which worked with college authorities and campus police. The military even placed its agents in classrooms.

Federal agencies and the military increased their investigations of students and faculty on college campuses beginning in the late 1960s during the antiwar movement, at which time it was even extended to high schools.

In the late 1960s a military bureaucracy known as the Continental United States Intelligence (CONUS) conducted widespread surveillance on civilians using multiple groups under its command. These included the USA Intelligence Command (USAINTC), the Continental Army command (CONARC), and the Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning (DCDPO).

CONARC was responsible for coordinating all military intelligence activities domestically, including civil disturbances and the surveillance of civilians. In 1965 various MIGs were combined to form USAINTC, which took over these responsibilities.

Both USAINTC and CONARC had an extraordinary communications grid connected to local police stations all across the country, and had deployed Army agents at the stations to run the equipment. USAINTC had hundreds of offices throughout the country. It kept its records of civilian dissidents and anti-war groups on computers, which the 1972 Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Right’s report, Army Surveillance of Civilians, referred to as “voluminous and far-reaching.”

The records kept by CONARC and USANIT originated from a variety of intelligence agencies such as the Army, Navy, and Air Force Intelligence, as well as the FBI, CIA, and local police units. According to the 1973 Senate report, the military’s surveillance of civilians in the 1960s was both massive and unrestrained, using undercover agents to conduct overt investigations. “No individual, organization, or activity which expressed ‘dissident views’ was immune from such surveillance,” the Senate report explained.

However, despite the attention given to the military’s activities, the report observed that it had been targeting citizens since at least 1917. During WWI military intelligence units worked with a nationwide network of civilians who monitored people in their communities who were thought to be subversive.

From 1956 to at least 1971 the FBI conducted its own massive covert domestic spying program to neutralize internal dissent known as the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). This was revealed by a 1975 US Senate investigation known as the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (also called the Church Committee).

It consisted of a series of projects conducted by the FBI where individuals and organizations were placed under surveillance and secretly attacked. COINTELPRO was allegedly launched for the purpose of protecting the nation’s security and “maintaining the existing social and political order.”

Although millions of pages of documents pertaining to the program were never released, and others have been altered, the remaining FBI records describe that COINTELPRO was designed to disrupt and subvert groups that were thought to be communist or socialist organizations. However, it appears that labeling individuals and groups as communists was simply an excuse to attack them. The program is known to have expanded considerably to include the targeting of nonviolent individuals, as well as antiwar, community, and religious groups.

The directives of the program, issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, were to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” these individuals and groups. The methods, which included psychological warfare, were originally developed to neutralize foreign agents. “Under the COINTELPRO programs,” explained the Church Committee, “the arsenal of techniques used against foreign espionage agents was transferred to domestic enemies.”

These were devastating methods used to destroy people under plausibly deniable conditions that left little trace. Some people placed under surveillance and attacked were not even aware that they were the target of an investigation.

The government used high-tech surveillance equipment, wiretaps, bugs, microphones, mail openings, etc. People’s homes were entered while they were away. A secret network of government informants was used to attack people. With these methods, the government was able to gain a vast amount of information regarding people’s personal lives, which was used for “unsavory and vicious tactics.”

After people were placed under surveillance, their parents, children, spouses, landlords, college administrators, employers, and even church superiors, were frequently used by the FBI to apply pressure on them. The acquaintances and family of those placed under surveillance were basically intimidated into participating in a bogus investigation with the intention of destroying the targeted individual.

Psychological warfare was used, as well as character assassination, the disruption of communications, and fake media stories. Events were disrupted by spreading false information. The FBI would not only intercept mail, but would forge correspondence. Or, in other words, they would spoof the dialog between people. Tactics to destroy people’s marriages and careers were used.

The FBI worked with the police to harass dissidents. In fact, framings were used, and officers of the law gave perjured testimonies to get people imprisoned. The FBI and local police departments conducted secret entries into people’s homes under the guise of searching for evidence. Other government agencies such as the IRS cooperated by selectively auditing people.

COINTELPRO used an “army of informers” deployed across the country to harass people. Agents also used state-run organizations to harass people seeking services, such as health, safety, building regulations, welfare, unemployment benefits, licensing, etc.

“If COINTELPRO had been a short-lived aberration” expressed the committee, the “techniques, and control presented might be safely relegated to history.” However, because the program existed unofficially for years before it was discovered, they warned that future activities could continue under the facade of investigations.

Executive Order 12333 signed into law by President Reagan in 1981 legalized COINTELPRO activities. It allows for the FBI, CIA, military, local law enforcement, and anyone acting on their behalf, to engage in counterintelligence activities. This includes the use of specialized surveillance equipment and any type of expert technical assistance; all done without a warrant. The US Patriot Act has since superseded this order.

The BSSR warned that the various democratic nations would be increasingly using such investigations to neutralize dissent. They mentioned that bases of operations would be used by the security forces for long-term surveillance of subjects, of which they would have detailed computer-based profiles.

The forces would be using high-tech surveillance equipment connected to computers, including sensors which could detect heat, odor, vibration, sound, magnetic fields, and other signals. These sensors were to be cleverly concealed inside the target’s home.

Sources