Back to the Future
In 1980, the Los Angeles Times reporter David Cay Johnston approached Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates at a public function to ask him a question. Gates responded with a question of his own: “He asked me, in the crude language of cops, if I liked women with red hair and large bosoms.” Johnston did, in fact, like exactly that very kind of special lady, and Gates went on to describe for the reporter, in great detail, his recent dating activity, down to the names of restaurants and a precise listing of entrees and drink orders.
For years, Johnston’s experience was normal stuff for critics and journalists who looked at the LAPD too closely, as the department maintained its own dirty tricks squad — the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) — to spy on political opponents. The spying sometimes crossed into unsubtle message-sending, as critics coming back to their cars and offices found gloveboxes and filing cabinet drawers left open for them to see. Like a police chief telling a reporter about his sex life, the PDID wanted people to know they were being watched.
Los Angeles was hardly unique. Police departments all over the country had Cold War “red squads,” and spent the 1960s infiltrating groups of hippies and watching them…do hippie stuff. On the long timeline of domestic political surveillance, 1983 stands out as an especially interesting year — the moment when the LAPD was forced to close the PDID, and the year when researchers first got their hands on some of the political opposition files created by the FBI under the longtime leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. That last linked story says that the FBI had files on “Eleanor Roosevelt's sex life,” forcing one to suspect that federal agents have also smelled Mamie Eisenhower’s underwear.
For a while, the momentum gently turned in the opposite direction, and we lost some small portion of our taste for having cops sneak around in the bushes to see which journalists were into redheads. Then came 9/11, and the resulting resurgence in law enforcement political surveillance.
Now comes 1/6, that day of terror when an unarmed woman violently assaulted a police lieutenant’s bullet with her body, and we learn that the Capitol Police have sharply increased their intelligence-gathering operation. As Politico reports, a new intel “template” for Capitol Police calls for the more aggressive pursuit of information on “lawmakers’ opponents and their opponents’ supporters” and “people whom lawmakers planned to meet, including donors and associates”:
Analysts also were tasked with sifting through tax and real estate records to find out who owned the properties that lawmakers visited. For example, the unit scrutinized a meeting that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) held with donors in a private home. Analysts eyed the homeowner’s and attendees’ social media accounts, and looked for any foreign contacts they had.
There are no mysteries about the implications and the trajectory of this kind of effort. Like everything else, we’ve done this before, and we know how it ends.
And yet we do it anyway.