More on the New Red Scare

Actually read this last week, but didn't end up linking to it (to the best of my memory. Now it seems more relevent.

Michelle Goldberg there at Salon wrote a pair of articles on the harassment of protesters that seems to be on the rise. One bit in the second part struck me then, and came back to me today.

""In the 1950s and '60s, police departments all over the country had 'red squads,'" says Chris Pyle, a politics professor at Mount Holyoke College and one of the country's foremost experts on domestic surveillance. "Although their work was never as well documented as that of the FBI and the military, it was far more extensive. There was considerable swapping, and it tended to go from the locals to the nationals."

Pyle saw it firsthand at the national level. A former captain of Army intelligence, Pyle exposed the military's domestic spying operations and went on to work for Sen. Frank Church during the congressional investigation of COINTELPRO. Today's domestic spying, he says, isn't nearly as extensive as it was at the height of the movement against the Vietnam War, largely because there aren't as many protests. Yet the surveillance we're seeing now, he says, is likely to increase if the antiwar and anti-Bush movements grow, and it may imperil civil liberties more than J. Edgar Hoover ever could.

"What we're seeing is something much larger in scale and danger than anything that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s," he says. "That's because of computers. Now, instead of having these agencies working in semi-isolation or occasional cooperation, there's the equivalent of the great Alaska pipeline running between them, and the information flows in both directions. In addition, in the 1950s or '60s, it took weeks of pavement pounding and doorknobbing for the FBI or police or military to collect personal information about people, the kind of information you need to put them under surveillance. Today that kind of information can be obtained by a few computer keystrokes. The harassment potential is much greater."

Meanwhile, information that's put into the system tends to spread. "Today, you have at least a dozen American agencies contributing information to each other's computer, and scores of foreign intelligence agencies contributing information," says Pyle."

Something to keep in mind. A lot of you might be saying, well that's not very likely. I'll agree, that I don't believe that we are looking at a full on red scare (directed at liberals) in the short term. But saying it can't happen here is not very reasonable because it has happened here. And some in our society are laying the ground work for their version of the red scare.