Explore Tor, NYC! Meetup and Q&A On Feb 15

History, they say, is never circular, but it is often helical. It follows that in order to understand current events, it is almost always useful to revisit past events.

For example, to understand FBI's current group think (which explain why it devotes so much more effort to investigating alleged political "crimes" than to actual crimes, and to clumsy "suasion" programs intended to discourage "problematic" behavior, such as reading too much), you should know about past FBI activities and group think.

Case in point: consider the following FBI dragnet surveillance program (which was revived-- with slightly different targets-- in technologically supercharged fashion after 9/11):

theatlantic.com
The FBI's War on Black-Owned Bookstores
At the height of the Black Power movement, the Bureau focused on the unlikeliest of public enemies: black independent booksellers.
Joshua Clark Davis

> The FBI conducted investigations of such black booksellers as ... Paul Coates in Baltimore (the father of The Atlantic national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates)...
> ...
> The FBI’s reports on black booksellers were highly invasive but often mundane. The FBI reports note phone calls from Coates’s number to his former comrades in the Black Panther Party—but also to Viking Press and the American Booksellers Association.
> ...
> Plainclothes agents who visited the store aroused employees’ suspicions when they sat in parked cars in front of the business for hours. In another incident, two men wearing suits who appeared to be federal agents visited Drum and Spear and asked to purchase the store’s entire inventory of Mao’s Little Red Book.
> ...
> While perhaps not surprising, it is deeply disturbing that Hoover and the FBI would carry out sustained investigations of black-owned independent bookstore across the country as part of COINTELPRO’s larger attacks on the Black Power movement. But Hoover’s order that agents track these stores’ customers represented not just an attack on black activists, but also an absolute contempt for America’s stated values of freedom of speech and expression. Any citizen who stepped into a black-owned bookstore, it seemed, risked being investigated by federal law enforcement.

And to answer your question, here is one way of summarizing what's been happening lately in the USA:

During the Nixon administration, FBI helped to partially convert the War on Vietnam into a War on American social justice movements, e.g. the one led by Martin Luther King. A few decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Military Industrial Complex, seeking a new mission, became the Surveillance-Military Industrial Complex. Inevitably, the technologically enabled GWOT (Global War on Terror) spawned NSA's "Collect it all, Own it all, Exploit it all" dragnet cyberwar against all non-USPERs. Over the span of the next few years, inevitably, the GWOT morphed into a War on US (We the People).

And naturally, the authors of the War on US, the intelligence chiefs, are making millions in their new role as talking heads explaining to TV viewers, in momentary sound-bites, the evils of the Surveillance State, for example in enabling Turnkey Authoritarianism, or offering potent cyberweapons to "national adversaries" such as Russia. They never mention that privacy advocates had been warning of these dangers for decades. Nor that their entire careers have been devoted to lying, misdirection, and manipulation of popular beliefs--- a manifest truth which if popular media even pretended to engage in rational discourse, would presumably call into question the credibility of the former USIC chiefs.

So if you really want to know what's happening in America, visit the kind of bookstore which is surveilled by FBI, and read, read, read.

This is going to be really interesting, I'm sure there's going to be news articles about it don't know how legit they'll be but whatever. You guys are open as hell about Q and As when it comes to 'citizens', but when it comes to government agencies let's lawyer up. Lol.