Member-only story
A Letter to the Mainstream Media
We cannot allow private organizations to profit from the control and shaping of our minds.
In early June of this year, Buzzfeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier posted a news story about a secret Justice Department memo that would temporarily authorize the Drug Enforcement Agency to conduct surveillance on American citizens participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd. The article also cited a statement issued by Attorney General William Barr blaming “anarchistic and far left extremists, using Antifa-like tactics” for the unrest. According to Barr; the DEA, along with the FBI, US Marshalls and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would be “deployed to support local efforts to enforce federal law.”
Older Americans have seen this type of covert surveillance before. COINTELPRO, a national counter-intelligence program initiated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 was secretly deployed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” groups that the FBI deemed to be “subversive”. This program, initially intended to target communists and socialists, was quickly expanded in the 1960s to include civil rights leaders, anti-war protestors and members of the New Left.
Most notably, Hoover used COINTELPRO to discretely monitor and influence media coverage of these groups. As evidenced…
