slate | The FBI has a lead. A prominent
religious leader and community advocate is in contact with a suspected
sleeper agent of foreign radicals. The attorney general is briefed and
personally approves wiretaps of his home and offices. The man was born
in the United States, the son of a popular cleric. Even though he’s an
American citizen, he’s placed on a watchlist to be summarily detained in
the event of a national emergency. Of all similar suspects, the head of
FBI domestic intelligence thinks he’s “the most dangerous,” at least
“from the standpoint of … national security.”
Is this a lone wolf in league with foreign sponsors of terrorism? No: This was the life of Martin Luther King Jr. That FBI assessment was dated Aug. 30, 1963—two days after King told our country that he had a dream.
We now find ourselves in a new surveillance debate—and the lessons of
the King scandal should weigh heavy on our minds. A few months after
the first Edward Snowden revelation, the National Security Agency disclosed that it had itself wiretapped
King in the late 1960s. Yet what happened to King is almost entirely
absent from our current conversation. In NSA reform debates in the House
of Representatives, King was mentioned only a handful of times, usually
in passing. And notwithstanding a few brave speeches by senators such
as Patrick Leahy and Rand Paul outside of the Senate, the available
Senate record suggests that in two years of actual hearings and floor
debates, no one ever spoke his name.
There is a myth in this country that in a world where everyone is
watched, everyone is watched equally. It’s as if an old and racist J.
Edgar Hoover has been replaced by the race-blind magic of computers,
mathematicians, and Big Data. The truth is more uncomfortable. Across
our history and to this day, people of color have been the
disproportionate victims of unjust surveillance; Hoover was no
aberration. And while racism has played its ugly part, the justification
for this monitoring was the same we hear today: national security.
