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The FBI’s past precursor to future?

Via Cursor, a fascinating “Special Report” called The Campus Files at the San Francisco Chronicle’s online site SF Gate. The series revolves around various FBI memos from the 1960’s that reveal the coordinated efforts of the FBI, CIA, and then-California governor Ronald Reagan to undermine those Hoover and his cronies deemed subversive. Especially disturbing is being able to compare the FBI memos with most of their contents censored for what the FBI claimed were reasons of protecting information about law enforcement operations, and the same memos un-censored (obtained after a 17-year long and eventually successful Freedom of Information Act suit). Needless to say the previously censored information didn’t contain anything sensitive about law enforcement, but a lot of information about the illegal surveillance of various people connected with the University of California at Berkeley.

To quote from a 1969 memo from J. Edgar Hoover’s third in command to his second in command:

[Governor Ronald Reagan’s Legal Affairs Secretary] Mr. [Herbert] Ellingwood stated that Governor Reagan is dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on California college campuses. The state government will attack these groups through several methods. (1) By hounding the groups as much as possible by bringing any form of violation available against them. He cited as an example that if any of these groups has a bookstore on campus they will bring building code violations against them.[…] (3) A psychological warfare campaign. In this connection Mr. Ellingwood indicated that he plans to confer with Department of Defense officials today to get ideas from those individuals as to how to conduct campaigns of this nature.[…]

The lessons for today’s era of “homeland security” are painfully obvious. Look no further than Ashcroft’s recent lifting of restrictions on the FBI to monitor religoius meetings and Internet traffic.

Update: Found this over at the Nando Times:

Most Americans would concede freedoms for security, poll says

Four in five Americans would give up some freedoms to gain security […] a new Gallup poll found.

About one-third of those polled favor making it easier for authorities to access private e-mail and telephone conversations.

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Blogging energy flagging

It has been a slow week here (on this blog, not my life). I started working this week, which as all work does occupied a nice chunk of my time. However, it really was mindshare that was getting used up in abundance, and so this week I haven’t felt very effusive.

Truth be told as well, I’ve been trying to assess exactly what I want out of this blog. I haven’t been entirely happy with how it has started out, and frankly I don’t have (especially now with employment) the energy to keep it going as some sort of political or news analysis blog. On the other hand, I haven’t been very comfortable with the idea of making it more personal, more like a diary. Lord knows there are plenty of those types of blogs out there, and most that I read bore me to tears when they’re not making me cringe out of embarrassment for the author. (To be fair of course, there are also plenty of politically minded web-rags out there that either bore me or make me cringe). I suppose we’ll just have to see where it goes….

Speaking of work, I went out for beers after my first day of non-on-the-job-training last Friday night, and ended up in a sports bar watching the second half of the England-Argentina game. I’ll admit I got more than a bit tipsy, and at 11:45pm found myself at a crowded Omiya station with a lot of other tipsy members of Japanese society waiting for the last train home. As I stood there on the platform in my salaryman suit and tie trying to stay balanced with my cellphone in hand and my thumb typing out an email to my wife letting her know that I indeed was on my way home, I had an epiphany: I had arrived in Japan. In some small very tiny way, I felt I belonged, that I had passed that grey demarcation line between tourist and resident.

The sports bar itself had been energizing. all these young Japanese inexplicably rooting passionately for England, many of them sporting painted red and white flags on their cheeks. I could have cared less about the outcome, but I found myself by the end rooting for the British side as well. After Beckham and co. came out victorious, I had my British by association hand shaken by a half-dozen or so Japanese who congratulated me on my victory.

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More Cup blogs

Updating my post below, there are more World Cup blogs to add to the site I mentioned previously. Jason Kottke has links to them. www.worldcupblog.org wins the domain name sweepstakes, and is quite enjoyable, with “real-time” updates and hilarious insight into the various teams’ hairstyles. Not surprisingly, the Japanese team comes in for some commenting here.

Speaking of the Japanese side, I watched their opener against on tape as recorded by my wife, since I was working during the match. Somehow I managed to make it home from work without hearing the score, although at one of the stops on my line I could see Japan supporters in their blue shirts in the train opposite the platform (obviously returning from Saitama Stadium, the site of the match and not very far from where we live), and they didn’t look exactly overjoyed, so I was assuming a Japan loss. What a joy then to see that the hosting upstarts actually make a game of it and play a lot better than the team I saw perform mediocrely in several friendlies recently. In fact, they perhaps should have won the game, because to my untrained eye it seemed quite obvious that they were denied two foul calls which would have given them penalty kicks, and I couldn’t help wondering whether Rivaldo’s recent admission of faking an injury in Brazil’s match against Turkey may have contributed to last night’s referree being overly forgiving. (However, when the play wasn’t in either team’s goal area, the Costa Rican referree was more than happy to blow the whistle — a total of 48 fouls were called during the game).

Speaking of Rivaldo and the Brazil vs. Turkey match, I was amused by this bit of hyperbole from the Turks on Korean referree Kim Young-joo:

“We sacrificed 1,000 soldiers here to defend the South Koreans and one Korean has now killed 70m Turks,” said Haluk Ulusoy, president of the Turkish FA. “We love Koreans, but that man cannot be a referee.”

Uh, the Turks should be the last one‘s using genocidal references in vain.