
What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals - rooster8
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html
======
declan
Much of this was known before, including the FBI's anonymous letter attempting
to provoke a suicide. As others said elsewhere in this thread, documents came
out during the Church Committee. I wrote this 15 years ago when I worked at
Time:

    
    
          The FBI's campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther
          King began in December 1963, soon after the
          famous civil rights March on Washington. It
          started with an extensive -- and illegal -- electronic
          surveillance of King that probed into every corner
          of his personal life. 
    
          Two weeks after the march, the same week King
          appeared on the cover of Time magazine as "Man
          of the Year," FBI agents inserted a microphone in
          King's bedroom. ("They had to dig deep in the
          garbage to come up with that one," FBI director J.
          Edgar Hoover said of the Time cover story.) Hoover
          wiretapped King's phone and fed the information to
          the Defense Department and to friendly
          newspapermen. 
    
          When King travelled to Europe to receive the
          Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover tried to derail meetings
          between King and foreign officials, including the
          Pope. Hoover even sent King an anonymous
          letter, using information gathered through illegal
          surveillance, to encourage the depressed civil
          rights leader to commit suicide. 
    
          "The actions taken against Dr. King are
          indefensible. They represent a sad episode in the
          dark history of covert actions directed against
          law-abiding citizens by a law enforcement
          agency," a Senate committee concluded in 1976. 
    
       […]
    
          History reveals that time and again, the FBI,
          the military and other law enforcement
          organizations have ignored the law and spied on
          Americans illegally, without court authorization.
          Government agencies have subjected hundreds of
          thousands of law-abiding Americans to unjust
          surveillance, illegal wiretaps and warrantless
          searches. Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King
          Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic
          priests were spied on. The FBI used secret files
          and hidden microphones to blackmail the
          Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and
          influence presidential elections. 
    

[http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html](http://www.politechbot.com/p-00660.html)

~~~
higherpurpose
Shame we never had any Church committee after the Snowden revelations. Where
are all the NSA "reforms" now? They even have the nerve to say that the
"pendulum has swung too far" in favor of privacy, when absolutely _nothing_
has changed in the form of law since then.

~~~
declan
> Where are all the NSA "reforms" now?

Yep. It's been ~18 months since we first heard of Edward Snowden, and there
have been no significant policy (as in, presidential executive order) or legal
changes to NSA surveillance authority.

I don't know why there's no modern-day Church committee, but here are a few
hypotheses:

1\. Sen. Church was running the investigation circa 1975, a few years after
Watergate was exposed and a year after Nixon resigned. I suspect there was
much more public concern about executive abuses than there are today, and the
GOP's willingness to defend the Nixon administration was limited post-Waterage
(compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D in
the White House).

2\. Much of FedGov's surveillance abuses pre-Church were clearly illegal and
criminal. The lesson intelligence agencies learned is that, no matter how
dodgy the behavior, as long as there's an AG opinion theoretically blessing
it, you won't be prosecuted. So the surveillance abuses today may violate the
4A and our sense of proportionality, but they aren't clearly indictable
offenses. Instead of "clearly illegal" you have "AG blessed in a written
opinion and lawyers may disagree."

3\. There was no Intelligence Committee back then, so TLAs were more limited
in being able to get congressional buy-in for warrantless surveillance. Now
there is, and Feinstein (and Rs on it as well, to be sure) have been the
biggest defenders of the NSA post-Snowden. They have to be: they were read in
on the programs and were complicit in any wrongdoing. Answer: argue there was
none!

4\. Forty years after the Church Committee, people now may _expect_ to be
under surveillance (sadly) and expect FedGov to be corrupt. Look at post-1970s
movies like Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, V
for Vendetta, etc. So what would have shocked the average American's
conscience 40 years ago may now be almost expected. (This is the boiling-frog
theory.)

5\. There's a lot more inflation-adjusted $$$ to be made from the
surveillance-industrial complex now especially post-9/11 than there was 40+
years ago. It may be an order of magnitude higher. More tax $$$ kicking around
== more support in Washington officialdom.

I'm sure there are other explanations too but those are the first that come to
mind...

~~~
disposition2
> (compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D
> in the White House).

While the sitting POTUS is in fact a Democrat, a lot of the revelations
presented by Snowden (and the AG opinions blessing the illegal spying (and
torture, etc)) where initiated under a Republican POTUS and for most of his
tenure a Republican majority in Congress. And while we didn't have solid
evidence before Snowden, it was fairly common knowledge that rights were being
infringed upon in the guise of security (and ironically 'protecting our
freedoms'). And I cannot really recall a GOP member being outraged about this
then or now.

Regardless, both parties have been pretty absent in this debacle and
typically, when a congress-person steps out from the herd and starts to
question the legitimacy of it all, they typically get displaced in the next
election.

~~~
declan
This is the rule: Party X will defend unconstitutional electronic surveillance
when the president is Party X. And it will _attack_ unconstitutional
electronic surveillance when the president is NOT(Party X).

The above rule holds true for both major parties.

------
wyager
Let this serve as a demonstration that government agencies actually can be
comically evil.

A lot of people dismiss accusations against government agencies or fail to
consider hypothetical legal abuse scenarios because "the government would
never do that". Yes, the government _would_ ever do that.

~~~
mathattack
It's stronger than the government _would_ do that. It's that the government
_did_ that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great
civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.

~~~
Scuds
In J. Edgar Hoover's mind

Civil Rights Movement -> Destabilizing Effect on American Culture -> Probably
a Communist Plot -> Civil Rights Movement is the Enemy

~~~
pastProlog
Another thing to bear in mind was that a large part of the civil rights
movement was blacks trying to exercise rights which they theoretically had a
legal right to exercise in the 1950s and 1960s - vote in federal elections,
travel in integrated interstate buses and use the bus terminal facilities
during transfers, attend all-white public schools which the Brown decision had
forbid in 1954 etc. So this was the government using its intelligence powers
to secretly persecute people who were trying to non-violently exercise the
rights they technically had under the law.

Who know what political uses the information stored in the Utah Data Center
will be used for in the future?

------
Mikeb85
It continually amazes me that Americans can perpetuate the myth that their
government is a democratic, moral force in the world given everything they
have done, and are still doing...

~~~
rooster8
Any system as large and complicated as this one will have failures. Our job is
to learn from the past and try to prevent it from happening again in the
future.

~~~
nraynaud
Yeah, failures that cost hundreds of thousands lives. We're talking about the
most weaponized country in the world, and one of the least shy to use its
weapons.

We are not talking about a movie maker delivering a boring scene who will try
to do better in the next movie. We're talking about toppling foreign
governments, invading countries, backing or installing dictatures,
assassinating people, droning teenagers, dealing cocaine, torturing people,
launching nuclear weapons. Doing it times and times over, never being shy
about it, and never admitting any wrong.

There is zero structure of improvement in the US government behavior. Those
structure exists, for example the Geneva treaty, the Rome treaty which brings
trial for war criminals, but the US government refuses any accountability.
There is no downside to the erratic US behavior.

~~~
slg
What country that has been considered a world power hasn't participated in the
same level of "evil"? The whole "power corrupts" thing isn't an American
problem it is a problem with human nature.

~~~
nitrogen
Why does a country need to be a singular "world power"?

------
samirmenon
The New York Times actually broke the story.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-
uncensore...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-
letter-to-mlk-reveals.html)

~~~
Mithrandir
Here's the letter:
[http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...](http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/mag-16Lede-
t_CA0-superJumbo.jpg)

~~~
Curmudgel
If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of
passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-
no. The original letter says:

    
    
      (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
      it has definite practical significant.
    

which the EFF quoted as

    
    
      (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
      it has definite practical significance).

~~~
dllthomas
I expect that was accidental, but I agree it should be fixed (either corrected
in brackets, or the original with a [sic]).

------
alukima
I spent an obsessive night searching through documents via online 'reading
rooms'. I don't have the links anymore but theres mounds of documentation
showing intelligence agencies doing shady shit like this to try to break up
civil rights groups. Fun look ups are 'blank panthers', 'san francisco',
'socialist', any black leader.

San Francisco seems like a broad term but there's so much interesting stuff,
they were watching school teachers in the 60s and 70s and trying to create
distrust within communities that were too left leaning.

[http://vault.fbi.gov/search](http://vault.fbi.gov/search)
[http://www.foia.cia.gov/](http://www.foia.cia.gov/)

~~~
Estragon
The word to search for is COINTELPRO. Tim Weiner's _Enemies: A History of the
FBI_ goes into some detail about it, and its notes probably provide pointers
to the relevant documents.

------
mynameishere
Eventually we'll know what's in his file:

 _The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove
he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert
Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his
associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their
homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the
surveillance tapes for 50 years._

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-
historic...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historical-
archives-that-will-spill-new-secrets-966931/)

...some people think he made extensive use of prostitutes, but I expect the
FBI would have pulled an "Eliot Spitzer" on him had that been the case. Still,
there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his
saintly image.

~~~
KerrickStaley
What Dr. King did or did not do isn't the point: the point is that the FBI
abused its power (in a drastic fashion) in an attempt to suppress and damage
King's political speech.

------
opendais
Tbh, this is what scares me about tech illiterate juries. Many of these cases
hang on key pieces of evidence that are literally the FBI's word against the
defendants.

~~~
spiritplumber
Good thing these things come up to make the FBI's word worth less, then!

We need some sort of standardised trust metric....

~~~
opendais
I'd prefer a better educated populace that realizes the "technical evidence"
being submitted in many cases is essentially witness testimony and not
physical evidence [e.g. fingerprints on the murder weapon] which I think many
people believe.

Witness testimony is perfectly fine as long as it isn't implied to be anything
greater than that.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Say the issue is call metadata. They showed that I called the murderer, who
then murdered someone I had a grudge against. So this evidence doesn't prove
that I _did_ order a hit, but at least proves that I had the _opportunity_ to
have done so.

The metadata is technical evidence, not witness testimony. But...

Who wrote the software that collected the metadata? Any bugs in it? Any
possibility that I did not, in fact, make that call?

Where was the metadata stored? Who had access to it? Could anybody have
altered it, perhaps even to cover their own tracks?

Who had custody of the data after the records got pulled from the database?
Any chance that they could have altered it? Maybe they knew that the
prosecution's case was weak, and they wanted to make it look better?

In this way, technical evidence does in fact depend on witness testimony.

~~~
opendais
Does that happen in every case for every piece of technical evidence?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I think it has to. The only way it could not is if you had a piece of physical
evidence, and you were going to extract the technical evidence from it there
in the courtroom in front of the jury. But even then, you have to worry about
the chain of custody of the physical evidence, and about the tool you're going
to use to extract the technical evidence in the courtroom...

~~~
opendais
Perhaps it does but I'm not convinced without evidence it happens and I can't
find any that shows it happens the majority of the time let alone all the time
:/

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well, I think what happens in an actual court case is, you check out the chain
of custody if you suspect that anything is actually fishy, or if you can make
the prosecution's case look weak. If there's nothing there that you can use in
your defense, then it never comes up in court.

~~~
opendais
Could be. But imo, anything the FBI touched would be suspect.

------
scintill76
The unredacted version is really interesting historically, but I don't think
it reveals much more about the lengths the FBI went to. I believe it was
already well-known and believed that King was being sexually blackmailed
specifically. The redacted portions all seem to deal with that exact nature of
the blackmailing.

The redaction reveals more about what the FBI wouldn't do: how at least one
person was reluctant to release public documentation proving that's what the
FBI did.

------
johnny99
Snopes has a good explainer largely debunking one of the nastier pieces of
misinformation circulating about MLK, which touches on FBI surveillance of
him:

[http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp](http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp)

------
rglover
Something that's always confused me about the world and people as a whole. Why
are so many people hell bent on implementing some "moral standard" that
everyone needs to follow? Honestly?

There's this bizarre projection of the individual and his/her motivations onto
every living being that fails to make any logical sense.

Is there any psychological premise for why we feel the need to dictate the
behavior of others such that they perfectly mirror how _we_ behave (or in many
cases, wish to)?

There appears to be a tipping point where someone agrees with a certain set of
values and as opposed to stopping at enforcing those values on themselves
(reasonable), they go absolutely nuts trying to push it onto everyone else.

A sort of: _how dare you_.

~~~
nraynaud
MLK was a religious ministry, so his job was to spread some kind of moral
standard on other people anyways. So 1) his moral standard where known 2) it
was quite fair for his opponents to use those moral standards against him.

(I'm not defending the letter or the FBI, I just think a minute detail of the
story is consistent)

~~~
wwweston
It's fair enough to characterize King's work as part religious ministry, and I
think it's also fair to consider what it means that King's walk didn't live up
to all of the standards one would assume would come with his apparent
Christianity.

I'm not sure it is in fact fair "to use those moral standards against him",
though, unless you're working with a conception of moral standards as a game
in which the point is to cast your team into The Good Guys and the other team
as The Bad Guys. And sure, some people play that exact game (the FBI is doing
it here), but you can also approach moral standards as ideals which would make
the world better if we could adhere to them. The latter conception still means
that people who fail to keep standards can suffer natural consequences (as
well as artificial ones of standing) if they don't adhere, but it's not much
of an attack on the moral authority of the standard.

There's also a question of a sort of standards severability. King is known for
agitating for racial equality and social justice, not for being a crusader for
the virtues of chastity and fidelity. If he'd been known to privately abuse
and privilege based on apparent race, or inclined to acquire wealth at the
expense of others, that'd seem be a bigger deal.

Finally, a little bit of C.S. Lewis:

"The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All
the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people
in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting,
the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me,
competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal
self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two.
That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be
far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be
neither."

Again, none of this is to discount the value it might have to consider an MLK
with weaknesses and some questionable behavior. Or, for that matter, the value
of fidelity.

------
neue
When was the letter written? What marked the significance of '34 days later'?

~~~
Hovertruck
I think the NYT article implied that it was 34 days until the ceremony where
he was awarded the Peace Prize.

------
rooster8
The URL was changed to the NY Times article that originally broke the story,
but this post originally linked to an EFF interpretation of the article:

FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of
Unchecked Surveillance

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-
dr...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-
luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance)

------
jqm
To me, the most ironic part of the whole situation is Hoover's private
behavior...

That aside, there is very little doubt in my mind Hoover was a bad man. The
sad part is, many people eventually are bad given the chance and they never
even know it. This is why impartial rules and transparency are important.

This may not be a common sentiment, but I look forward to the day when we are
governed by machines rather than monkeys. I mean... the constitution, the
rules of state and religion, they are algorithms no? Designed to remove as
much as possible the corruptible human element from the equation? So why not
take this concept a level further? That's my thinking.

Eventually there will always be another Hoover. But the next one might have
better tools. But I think the human race can build a better system based on
principals of efficiency, impartiality and beneficence. And maybe after a bit
more waste, abuse and needless suffering caused by greed (that is the bottom
line with the people who run the Hoovers of the world no?) it will.

------
jack-r-abbit
If this hadn't been labeled "suicide letter" I never would have read into it
that the writer wanted King to kill himself. "You know what to do" is actually
pretty vague. Do what? Come clean about his affairs? Leave the country? Quit
being a pain in the ass for the government? Quit working on civil rights?

------
sopooneo
Do we have a guess as to why they wanted him dead? Was it that those in power
believed the rise of African American citizens would disrupt the power
structure and their position in it? Or was it purely racist, with the powerful
just believing it was _wrong_ for black people to have equal rights?

------
josho
This puts in context why privacy is so important. If for some reason you were
to become a leader of a movement and the NSA had swept up every digital bit
about you for the last 30 years then they could potentially have a goldmine of
information to soil your name and put the movement into disarray.

------
codezero
Wow the redacted parts read like modern day news article comment sections. I
wonder, was it meant to look like it was sent from a crazy person, but to
include specific facts to scare MLK, or is this aligned with the typical kinds
of personality attacks done by people at the time?

------
dangayle
How hard would it be to create a fake internet paper trail containing
pornography, chat rooms, etc., as is mentioned in the article? It seems that
would be relatively trivial for a sufficiently motivated state actor to
perpetrate.

------
pitt1980
maybe we should compare some of these misdeeds to the misdeeds of the various
communist governments that inspired those misdeeds

------
comrade1
This was in the 1960s. Imagine the projects being conceived now for targeting
individuals and population subsets to change opinion, mood, etc. using things
like social media, targeted communications, etc.

The US then and now was totalitarian and authoritarian. Some of you,
especially here on hn, may not fall into those mind-sets but it doesn't matter
- you've lost - you're barely scraping by, working 60 to 80 hours a week and
you have no time to change your environment. Meanwhile the political class is
able to work full-time on perpetuating their power while taking away yours.
You have no power, no rights, because they have been chiseled away the last 30
years by the authoritarians.

I've said this before and I'm always downvoted but I don't care. Just leave.
Go to Berlin, or London (not much better though), Switzerland, or anywhere
else. Even if you go to someplace like the UK that isn't much better than the
u.s. you will at least no longer be contributing to a government spending 10X
to 100X of any other country on arguably evil pursuits. Take your wealth-
creation skills to somewhere else where you won't be contributing to your our
demise.

I know that many of you will discount this one event as a one-off - MLK was
certainly special. But it's only a one-off because it was the start of this
sort of campaign against someone that can bring change.

~~~
internet_arguer
I'll bite. From one troll account to another.

It's interesting when someone from Switzerland claims the moral high ground
about a country's past wrongs. Switzerland has a colorful history of Nazi
collaboration and laundering of stolen treasure by the 3rd Reich.

Is that an unfair characterization of you as a modern Swiss person? Yes.

Just like comparing 1960s America to the present day. The U.S. may not live up
to the ideals that are plastered over it's monuments, but it's certainly not
contributing to your demise (whatever that means).

> Just leave. Go to ...

Spoken like a true Swiss. No, we all don't have the spare funds or network of
employers to travel to a different country at will. Not to mention, SV is the
epicenter of venture capital in software, not Zurich. Who are the VCs who
would fund a startup's relocation to Zurich?

> contributing to a government

You can be forgiven for this, but U.S. citizens are perpetually bound to pay
taxes even when residing abroad. The first $90k is forgiven, but the next must
be taxed. Oh, and the state (e.g. California) doesn't play by these rules; it
takes the full amount.

~~~
comrade1
I'm not Swiss, I'm American.

The Swiss provided a service to the Jews in Germany and helped hide their
money from the nazis. Unfortunately most of their customers were killed... If
I lived in a country with a corrupt or evil government I would try to move my
money to Switzerland too, but the u.s. Is making it increasingly difficult to
conduct finance anonymously.

Based on your other comments... I'm not sure if you're aware of the rest of
the world. ETH is on par with MIT and EPFL is high up there as well. There is
a good start up community here in Zurich, but it's true that VC isn't as
advanced here - it's still mostly angel investors. Google has a big office
here and it seems to be adding to the enovironment.

But I'm not sure if Silicon Valley is a good goal. I've live and worked there
for startups and two big mainstream companies and have no desire to go back
that desperate life.

~~~
refurb
_The Swiss provided a service to the Jews in Germany and helped hide their
money from the nazis. Unfortunately most of their customers were killed..._

Oh lordy, that is the understatement of year!

 _" Documents recently uncovered in former East German archives suggest that
in 1944, SS Chief and German Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler sent a special
train loaded with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold, jewelry and
art objects to Switzerland for deposit in the vaults of Swiss banks."_[1]

[1][http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings/sinister.html)

------
daveloyall
Is there any indication that the modern FBI et al would use a strategy like
this?

OMG STOP THE PRESSES I figured out the men's rights thing!

------
baxterross
The government does more harm than good

~~~
AnimalMuppet
For all the harm that government does, anarchy is almost always worse.

~~~
none_for_me_thx
Anarchy => no rulers

not

Anarchy => no rules

~~~
dragonwriter
Rules come from somewhere.

That somewhere is rulers.

Therefore, no rulers => no rules.

Therefore, (Anarchy => no rulers) => (Anarchy => no rules).

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well, rules in anarchy have to come from consensus of the people. So the only
rules, in practice, are those that the people are willing _and able_ to
enforce against those who wish to break them.

History shows that, in anarchy situations, those who wish to break the rules
are sometimes highly motivated and well armed. Thus anarchy at least means "no
rules that apply to a warlord when he really wants them not to".

Now, one could argue that that is essentially the situation with the US
government now. But the well-armed warlords tend to show considerably less
restraint than the US government does.

~~~
PeterisP
There is no such thing consensus of the people in any communities of
nontrivial size.

In anarchy situations, whoever is capable of filling the power vacuum creates
new rules - the "highly motivated and well armed" groups don't break the rules
(since if they disagree, there's obviously not a consensus about those rules);
they define the rules and others possibly break them.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
True enough. But, technically, once someone fills the power vacuum, it's not
anarchy any longer.

(But if you're living in it, that "technically" isn't going to comfort you one
bit...)

------
diminoten
I find myself afraid to criticize this submission, because I don't feel an
honest discourse about this submission can take place on Hacker News.

That should sadden you, as it saddens me.

