Did the FBI Pay a University to Attack Tor Users?

> "Hate-int" (dual to "love-int") is not just for NSA operatives, unfortunately.

Hate-int has been a feature of FBI's enormous waste of tax dollars over its entire history, back to when it was called the Bureau of Investigation, and J. Edgar Hoover was merely a 21 year old up and coming back room executive.

Perhaps the most notorious example of hate-int by FBI is the anonymous letter penned by William Sullivan, the number two man at FBI--- or, as some revisionist historians now believe, by J. Edgar Hoover himself--- urging Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to commit suicide. The historian who discovered the original draft in FBI archives, Beverly Gage, described the significance of her find last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to…
What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals
Beverly Gage
11 Nov 2014

> When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King’s suspicion.
> ...
> The F.B.I.'s entanglement with King began not as an inquiry into his sex life but as a “national security” matter, one step removed from King himself.
> ...
> At this point Hoover decided to escalate his campaign. On Nov. 18, 1964 ... Hoover denounced King at a Washington news conference, labeling him the “the most notorious liar in the country.” A few days later, one of Hoover’s deputies, William Sullivan, apparently took it upon himself to write the anonymous letter and sent an agent to Miami, to mail the package to Atlanta.
> ...
> the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

Gage notes that

> The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong.

Comey wants everyone to believe he is a Boy Scout would never, ever, do harm to anyone for political gain. I believe the reports that he displays the wiretap order, but I doubt his sincerity when he claims to be determined not to continue what FBI has over its entire existence seen as its main mission: combating domestic "radicals" such as Martin Luther King--- or these days, Black Lives Matter activists.

FBI's widespread abuses were not limited by any means to encouraging Dr. King to commit suicide. Here's another long suspected abuse which has recently been confirmed in detail:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/pete-seeger-fbi-file
Pete Seeger’s FBI File Reveals How the Folk Legend First Became a Target of the Feds
David Corn
18 Dec 2015

> From the 1940s through the early 1970s, the US government spied on singer-songwriter Pete Seeger because of his political views and associations.

Yes, Pete Seeger, author of "Where have all the flowers gone?", "Turn, turn, turn", "If I had a hammer", and other classics. Founder of the Clearwater movement (which cleaned up the Hudson river). And--in the view of the FBI for more than three decades-- a bad American, a very dangerous citizen, and someone who posed a continuing threat to national security.

> According to documents in Seeger's extensive FBI file—which runs to nearly 1,800 pages (with 90 pages withheld) and was obtained by Mother Jones under the Freedom of Information Act—the bureau's initial interest in Seeger was triggered in 1943 after Seeger, as an Army private, wrote a letter protesting a proposal to deport all Japanese American citizens and residents when World War II ended.

The letter read:

>> Dear Sirs -
>>
>> I felt shocked, outraged, and disgusted to read that the California American Legion voted to 1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!
>>
>> We, who may have to give our lives in this great struggle—we're fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism.
>>
>> If you deport Japanese, why not Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians?
>>
>> If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too.
>>
>> America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed.
>>
>> I felt sick at heart to read of this matter.
>>
>> Yours truly,
>>
>> Pvt. Peter Seeger

A few years ago, in a White House ceremony, war criminal and US President Obama awarded a medal to a survivor of the US concentration camps, and officially apologized for the incarceration of millions of US citizens during WWII. The very abuse against which Seeger was so eloquently speaking out, as was his right under the Constitution, even in time of war, even as someone drafted into the US military.

It is worth taking a minute to compare Seeger's letter (signed, which is how he got in trouble) with the anonymous hate letter penned by FBI agent William Sullivan (or his boss, J. Edgar Hoover); you can find the full text here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mlk-uncovered-letter.png

Now which of these letters is a good example of a letter from a patriotic good American? The letter by Seeger, or the hate letter by Sullivan?

The FBI writes anonymous hate mail, and persecutes citizens who are brave enough to speak out against abuses by the government. Is that government of the People by the People for the People?

I think the answers are obvious.

FBI and NCTC are pushing their CVE programs, which include new inducements to American citizens to denounce their neighbors for acting or saying something deemed "suspicious" or otherwise "objectionable". In particular, FBI is encouraging schoolchildren to denounce their peers.

What could go wrong here?

Here is a recent example:

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/18/its_the_clock_kid_all_over_again_a_12_y…
Friday, Dec 18, 2015 9:15 PM UTC
It’s the “clock kid” all over again: A 12-year-old Sikh boy is the latest victim of racist terrorism paranoia
Paula Young Lee
18 Dec 2015

> Why did the Arlington police hold a twelve-year-old boy with a heart condition for three days without alerting his parents? Why did the school principal call the police in the first place?
>
> Because his name is Armaan Singh Sarai, his working-class Indian family is Sikh, and a “bully” at his school accused him of having a bomb in his backpack.

Hate-int, indeed.

What could go wrong when FBI misinterprets legal and responsible dissent as a "danger to national security" [sic]?

Corn notes that after the American Legion forwarded Pvt. Seeger's letter:

> Military intelligence officers across the country began probing Seeger and his background. They searched police records in various locales (and found nothing). They discovered that a House committee had come across his name twice while investigating subversives in the pre-war peace movement. They secretly read his mail, including letters from his Japanese American fiancee, Toshi Ohta, who was living in New York City. The investigators were concerned that Ohta was working for the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, which promoted the American war effort but was considered by the military gumshoes to be a Communist-influenced group.
> ...
> As part of the probe prompted by Seeger's protest letter, a military intelligence agent visited the grade school in Litchfield, Connecticut, that Seeger had attended—and found the available records did not cover the period when Seeger had been there. (And, he wrote in a report, "it is doubtful that the information obtained would be of any value.") This agent also went to Seeger's high school in Avon, Connecticut.
> ...
> Another agent went to Harvard University, where Seeger had studied for a year and a half before withdrawing due to financial reasons, and he managed to review Seeger's academic records ("Grades in the first year were fair") and gain access to the membership list of the Harvard Student Union, of which Seeger had been the secretary.
> ...
> An [FBI] agent interviewed [Pete Seeger's] father [Charles Seeger] "under pretext"—meaning the agent cooked up a phony reason for the interview—according to a report he later filed. Charles told the agent that his son had "bummed around" the country, playing the banjo and singing, before being drafted into the Army, and was "very much interested in the common people."
> ...
> Early in the investigation, an officer at Keesler Field interviewed [Pete] Seeger, who noted that he was puzzled that he had not been deployed as an aviation mechanic, given that he had completed his training. Seeger pointed out that he played the five-string banjo well and requested that he be assigned to the Special Services Department, which provided entertainment for the troops.
> ...
> On May Day in 1943, a military intelligence agent in New York City named Harwood Ryan interviewed folk singer Woody Guthrie as part of the Seeger investigation.
> ...
> Ryan ... was suspicious of Guthrie and thought he was being cagey about Seeger's political beliefs. In his report, he noted that in Guthrie's apartment he had spotted a large guitar that bore an inscription: "This machine kills Fascists." Ryan added that he believed "this bears out the belief that the Almanac Players were active singing Communist songs and spreading propaganda."

And there you have it, in one perfect image. During its entire existence, FBI has spent uncounted billions of US tax dollars protecting America--- from Woody Guthrie's terribly dangerous anti-fascist guitar.

90 odd pages of Seeger's FBI file were redacted from the version obtained by Mother Jones using the FOIA. Sources say these concern active investigations of persons one to three hops away from Seeger.

See Tim Weiner's book Enemies for much more on the history of the FBI's war on domestic political dissidents, over the entire course of its unfortunate existence.