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What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

nytimes.com

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Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#11

Post by herbig »

samirmenon wrote: post #8

The New York Times actually broke the story. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...

The first words of the EFF article are "The New York Times". This article, as the title suggests, goes more into the "dangers of unchecked surveillance" in a digital age.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#12

Post by scintill76 »

The unredacted version is really interesting historically, but I don't think it reveals much more about the lengths the FBI went to. I believe it was already well-known and believed that King was being sexually blackmailed specifically. The redacted portions all seem to deal with that exact nature of the blackmailing.

The redaction reveals more about what the FBI wouldn't do: how at least one person was reluctant to release public documentation proving that's what the FBI did.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#14

Post by jacquesm »

Scuds wrote: post #6
mathattack wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's stronger than the government would do that. It's that the government did that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.

In J. Edgar Hoover's mind Civil Rights Movement -> Destabilizing Effect on American Culture -> Probably a Communist Plot -> Civil Rights Movement is the Enemy

It wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover, it was everybody under him that cooperated with him on things like this.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#15

Post by FilhoDaPuTa »

mathattack wrote: post #3
wyager wrote: post #2

Let this serve as a demonstration that government agencies actually can be comically evil. A lot of people dismiss accusations against government agencies or fail to consider hypothetical legal abuse scenarios because "the government would never do that". Yes, the government would ever do that.

It's stronger than the government would do that. It's that the government did that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.

So, after knowing this, how hard is to believe that it was indeed the FBI who killed him ?

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#17

Post by mynameishere »

Eventually we'll know what's in his file:

The FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr. in an unsuccessful effort to prove he had ties to Communist organizations. In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted an FBI request to surreptitiously record King and his associates by tapping their phones and placing hidden microphones in their homes, hotel rooms and offices. A 1977 court order sealed transcripts of the surveillance tapes for 50 years.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/nine-historic...

...some people think he made extensive use of prostitutes, but I expect the FBI would have pulled an "Eliot Spitzer" on him had that been the case. Still, there's something there or they wouldn't be covering it up to protect his saintly image.

Re: What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

#18

Post by pastProlog »

Scuds wrote: post #6
mathattack wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's stronger than the government would do that. It's that the government did that. This incident of the government trashing one of the world's great civil rights heroes is a mark of shame that all of us Americans have to bear.

In J. Edgar Hoover's mind Civil Rights Movement -> Destabilizing Effect on American Culture -> Probably a Communist Plot -> Civil Rights Movement is the Enemy

Another thing to bear in mind was that a large part of the civil rights movement was blacks trying to exercise rights which they theoretically had a legal right to exercise in the 1950s and 1960s - vote in federal elections, travel in integrated interstate buses and use the bus terminal facilities during transfers, attend all-white public schools which the Brown decision had forbid in 1954 etc. So this was the government using its intelligence powers to secretly persecute people who were trying to non-violently exercise the rights they technically had under the law.

Who know what political uses the information stored in the Utah Data Center will be used for in the future?

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