Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/UNDERGRD/VOL_3/CUD321D.TXT

Text File | 1994-11-01 | 9.1 KB | 166 lines

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From: Jim Thomas >jthomas@[e-mail]<
Subject: Review of PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE
Date: 14 June, 1991

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***  CuD #3.21: File 4 of 7: Review of PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE   ***
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Review of: PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE: RED SQUADS AND POLICE REPRESSION
IN URBAN AMERICA, by Frank Donner. Berkeley: University of California
Press; 503 pp. $34.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Jim Thomas, Northern Illinois University

Sandy Sherizen's review of Gary Marx's UNDERCOVER (file 3, this issue)
demonstrates the potential dangers of covert police work to the
cyberworld. Frank Donner's PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE extends Marx's work
by illustrating the potential dangers of state intrusion into the
lives of those who appear to challenge a preferred view of the world.

Imagine the following scenario dredged from the depths of paranoid
fantasies:  Stodgy, a massive computer system into which over 750,000
customers call for benign services such as shopping by computer or
arranging travel plans, provides each customer with a package of
software that connects Stodgy's computer to each user's personal home
computer. Now, imagine that this software is highly proprietary and
nobody is really quite sure what it does when it is in the home
computer. It could provide many user-friendly conveniences, such as
replacing and deleting old versions of itself; it can scan the home
computer's operation system and files to assure smooth functioning and
non-disruption of other existing programs, and it assure smooth
communication between the home and master unit.  However,
communication means that the home computer is giving information,
albeit of a benign technical nature, just as it is receiving it.

Now, add a different scenario. Law enforcement agents suspect that a
serial killer is also a computer afficianado and subscribes to Stodgy.
Agents request that Stodgy add a component to their software that
allows it to scan through all the files, and even deleted files, in a
user's home computer and transfer that information back to the offices
of Stodgy, who would in turn give it over to agents for analysis.
With such user-interface software, it becomes quite possible to
collect copious quantities of private, personal information from
millions of citizens and keep computerized files on citizens for the
professed noble goal of protecting the social order.

What does this have to do with Frank Donner's "Protectors of
Privilege?" The basis of a democratic society rests on the ability of
citizens to openly discuss competing ideas, challenge political power
and assemble freely with others.  These fundamental First Amendment
rights are subverted when, through neglect, the state fails to protect
them.  Worse, they are shattered when the state itself silences
political dissent and disrupts freedom of assembly.

PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE details silencing of the worst sort: State
agents who systematically used their power and resources to subvert
the democratic process by targeting generally law-abiding private
citizens for surveillance, "dirty tricks," or violence. Given the
revelations from the report of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence (Church Report) in 1975 and from other sources, it is
hardly a secret that local, state, and federal agencies have engaged
in extreme covert surveillance and disruption of groups or individuals
of whom they disapprove.  However, Donner does not simply  repeat what
we already know.  The contribution of PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE lies
in Donner's meticulous research of the scope and depth of political
surveillance and in pulling together the voluminous data within an
implicit conflict paradigm (although he neither uses this term nor
alludes to his work in this fashion) to illustrate how surveillance
has historically been employed to protect the interests of those in
power in the guise of safeguarding democracy.  The roots of political
surveillance, Donner argues, began with the state's intervention in
labor unrest in the nineteenth century.  In Chicago, for example, the
police "unambiguously served as the arm of the dominant manufacturing
and commercial interests" and dispersed strikers, raided meetings, and
terrorized demonstrators (p. 11). By portraying labor activists as a
threat to the commonweal, the police acquired public support--or at
least tolerance--to subvert First Amendment rights of freedom of
speech and association.

Although Donner perhaps overstates the quiescence of labor and radical
groups in the early twentieth century, he correctly identifies
Depression-era activism as the source of a new phase of government
suppression.  Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, in MASTERS OF
DECEIT, equated Communism with cancer, and cancer was a disease to be
eradicated.  Hoover's views and policies serve as an icon for
understanding the fear of a nebulous social menace that justified the
organization of special, usually secret, "red squads" within police
agencies of large urban cities in the post-depression years, and the
social unrest of the 1960s further stimulated data acquisition on and
disruption of those whose politics were judged as unacceptable.

Donner devotes the bulk of his study to the period between 1960-80,
and and focuses on the major U.S. cities (Chicago, New York,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles). Drawing from court documents, files
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, media accounts, and
other sources, an image emerges of law enforcement run amok in its
efforts to amass information, much of it useless or fabricated, to
disrupt dissenters who appeared excessively liberal, and to attack
those who challenged police authority.  Donner's controlled
indignation is relatively restrained, and he relies on the power of
chilling examples of law enforcement abuses to convey the message that
political surveillance had far less to do with maintaining social
stability than in protecting the interests of a dominant class on one
hand and enhancing the careers of cynical politicians or police
officials on the other.

Lest his readers be left with the impression that the subversion of
Constitutionally protected rights of political expression by the state
was simply an anomaly occuring only in a few large cities, Donner
includes a chapter on "second tier" cities, including Detroit,
Baltimore, and Washington D.C. The pattern of abusive surveillance
duplicates the larger cities, suggesting that excesses were the norm,
not the exception.

Donner's work would be valuable if it were only a history of official
abuse in our nation's recent past. But, his work is much more than
simply a chronicle.  Although most agencies have at least attempted to
curtail the most serious forms of abuse--albeit only when forced to as
the result of public outrage or legal action--there is no evidence
that the surveillance has stopped. The FBI's monitoring of of
political organizations such as CISPES or the Secret Service's
creation of a "sting" computer bulletin board system in a way that
contradicts the "official" explanation of it, are just two recent
examples that challenge claims that surveillance is under control.
Computer technology creates a new danger for those concerned with
surveillance. Law enforcement now has the technological means to
monitor activities and process data infinitely more comprehensively,
quickly, and surreptitiously than a decade ago.  Donner's work reminds
us that an open society can in no way tolerate threats to our liberty
>from those entrusted to protect it.

Just as I completed writing the above review, I noticed the following
news article:

     "Killing Columnist Plotted, Liddy Says" (Chicago Tribune, (June
     13, 1991: Sect. 1, p. 2):

     New York (AP)--In their first face-to-face meeting, G. Gordon
     Liddy, mastermind of the bungled Watergate burglary, told
     columnist Jack Anderson that the president's men vetoed plans to
     silence the newsman.

     "The rationale was to  come up with a method of silencing you
     through killing you," Liddy tells Anderson on "The Real Story," a
     news show to be shown Thursday night on cable TV's CNBC.

With not a hint of irony, the story continues that the White House
thought such a sanction was too severe. Rumors of this have been
floating around for awhile, but it's the first time, to my knowledge,
a participant has made a public comment, but there's something so
postmodernly absurd about talking about it F2F on national TV in the
same way that the galloping gourmet would trade recipes with Julia.
Marx's and Donner's cynicism in and distrust of gov't seens terribly
understated if we can so serenely turn a potential gov't murder plot
into TV fare.

Given the government's actions in Operation Sun Devil and other abuse
of existing law enforcement procedures, concern for protections of
rights in cyberspace seem crucial.

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