When Big Brother watches you: A history of spying

Edward Snowden, a communications analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA), has been granted one-year asylum in Russia. This spring, he revealed that the NSA, for years, has been monitoring and archiving all electronic communications made by Americans and others. Snowden was charged in June with espionage. Snowden is charged with spying because he revealed that our government is spying on us. Our government does not deny Snowden’s claim. It is doing what Snowden says it is doing and it has no plans to stop doing it. What the government has told us is that their “listening in” will be innocuous so far as most Americans are concerned. The government seeks terrorists, it says, not information that could be used to intimidate and harm the innocent.What our government says is not true. Information gathered by government about individuals has been used to intimidate and harm the innocent and will be again. I know this from personal experience. Now my concern is that what happened to me might next happen to others.Some history about wiretapping and the law: In 1934, Congress made wiretapping illegal. In 1939, President Roosevelt’s Attorney General Robert Jackson, a one-day Supreme Court Justice and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, declared that wiretapping, absolutely, would not be used as a surveillance tool by the Justice Department. In 1939 the Supreme Court upheld the wiretap ban issued by Congress in 1934. Nonetheless, soon after taking office in 1933, President Roosevelt ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to employ the FBI and wiretapping to “look into the Nazi movement in the United States. This Hoover did and in 1936, with Roosevelt’s agreement, Hoover expanded his campaign of illegal wiretapping, bugging and housebreaking to include surveillance of organized labor and the Socialist and Communist parties.”During World War II, my left-wing Democrat parents worked in Washington, D. C., my father, Ed Brecher, for the Federal Communications Commission where his immediate boss was Max Lowenthal, a scholar and lawyer.New Deal politics in D.C. at that time, because of the war, were sure-footed and sometimes arrogant and after 1946, as a long brewing, inevitable reaction to the New Deal set in, hundreds of left-wing liberal government workers lost their jobs. My family left for New Jersey in 1947. Those were the days of the Un-American Activities Committee, (HUAC), the McCarthy Hearings and spying on citizens, intimidation and harassment by the FBI. My family assumed our phone was tapped.In 1949, my father and Max Lowenthal, his old boss at the FCC, wrote about all that and Henry Holt published “The FBI,” Max and my father’s book, the first damning critique of Hoover and his operation.Hoover was unable to stop publication of the book. He tried. He did block its distribution so that copies of the book just didn’t appear in most bookstores. At the same time, Hoover told my father that one day he was going to get Ed for what he had written.Hoover didn’t forget. The director had a long memory. He got back at Edward through me when my first wife and I applied to and were accepted by the Peace Corps in 1962 to go to teach school in Liberia, West Africa.My first wife, Patty, and I did not fly to Africa with the rest of our Peace Corps group. Instead, we sat in Connecticut for five months. We didn’t go overseas until after Patty and I had been interrogated at Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington by the Corps chief council and a one-armed FBI assistant director. At the end of the two-hour ordeal, I was reduced to tears. I had no idea what the FBI guy was talking about; I just knew that he was accusing me of being a spy. He spent his hour with us asking me about people I hadn’t known and only might have met when aged 8: my mother’s dentist and the station engineer at WQQW, a radio station my father managed briefly after the war. What was the man talking about?What Hoover’s people were trying to claim was that Patty and I were going to Africa as deep cover communist operatives. We were going to teach Liberians to speak Russian — or something.Ed Brecher was seated in the chief counsel’s outer office while we were being grilled. When I exited, weeping, my taciturn dad blew up, picked up a telephone and called Paul Porter, partner in a well-connected law firm and Ed’s Washington friend from the old days. Eventually, Porter’s intervention worked — remember we are talking the John F. Kennedy administration, not Eisenhower/Nixon — and shortly after Christmas Patty and I did go off to teach school in Africa.So now, this is the point. When the government claims that the information it is collecting on all of us will never be used to harm us, don’t you believe it! If someday some government official gets mad at you he can, and perhaps will, use your emails and “meta-data” to harm you.Wm. Earl Brecher is a former Peace Corps volunteer who lives in West Cornwall.Historical facts and the quote are from Lynne Olson’s “Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941”; copyright 2013, Random House Inc., New York. Max Lowenthal’s book is titled “The Federal Bureau of Investigation”; copyright 1950, William Sloane Associates, New York.