by Yasha Levine
To root out the enemy, General Yarborough oversaw the creation of CONUS Intel. Priests, elected officials, charities, after-school programs, civil rights groups, antiwar protesters, labor leaders, and right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society were targeted, but it seemed the primary focus of CONUS Intel was the Left: anyone perceived to be sympathetic to the cause of economic and social justice. It didn’t matter if they were clergy, senators, judges, governors, long-haired radicals from Students for a Democratic Society, or members of the Black Panthers—all were fair game.11
By the late 1960s, CONUS Intel involved thousands of agents. They attended and reported on even the smallest protest at a time when protests were as common as PTA bake sales. They monitored labor strikes and kept note of groups and individuals who supported unions. They bugged the phone of Senator Eugene McCarthy, a critic of the Vietnam War, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. They noted that the senator had taken a call from a “known radical group” to discuss providing medical assistance to protesters who had been injured by Chicago police. That same year, agents infiltrated a meeting of Catholic priests who protested the church’s ban on birth control. They spied on Martin Luther King’s funeral, mixing with mourners and recording what was talked about. They infiltrated the 1970 Earth Day festival and took photographs and filed reports on what antipollution activists were discussing and doing.12
Some of their surveillance targets were downright comical. A young army recruit from the Fifth Military Intelligence Detachment at Fort Carson, Colorado, spied on the Young Adults Project, which was established by church groups and a ski club to provide recreation for “emotionally disturbed young people.”13 The reason it was targeted? Apparently, local clergy did not like the project’s hippie associations and thought its leaders were leading these young adults to “drugs, loud music, sex, and radicalism.”14 The damning evidence proving that this group was part of a nefarious plot to take down the United States? One of its founders had attended an antiwar rally outside the Fort Carson military base.15 Then in 1968, agents were ordered to report on the Poor People’s March on Washington—and to pay particular attention to the mules’ buttocks. The pack animals were used to pull covered wagons from the rural South, and the army wanted its spies to look for sores or abrasions on the animals’ hides that could show signs of abuse. The idea was to accuse and charge protesters with animal cruelty.16
Much of the justification for the surveillance on suspected “foreign agents” was weak or nonexistent, but it did not matter. When army agents failed to find evidence of communist orchestration, their commanders told them to get back out there and try harder: “You haven’t looked hard enough. It must be there.”17
CONUS Intel agents used all sorts of tactics to spy on and infiltrate groups considered to be threats to America. Agents grew out their hair, joined groups, and marched in movements. They even created a “legitimate” news media front: Mid-West News. Wearing press accreditation passes, agents posed as reporters and attended protests, photographed attendees, and secured interviews with participants and organizers. The army even had its own sound and TV truck to videotape demonstrations.18
In an interview forty-five years after he blew the whistle on this surveillance program, Christopher Pyle told me:
The generals wanted to be consumers of the latest hot information. During the Chicago riots of 1968, the army had a unit called Mid-West News with army agents in civilian clothes and they went around and interviewed all the antiwar protesters. They shipped the film footage to Washington every night on an airliner so the generals could see movies of what was going on in Chicago when they got to work in the morning. That made them so happy. It was a complete waste of time. You could pick up the same thing on TV for far less, but they felt they needed their own film crew. The main thing they were going after was a pig named Pigasus, who was the Yippies’ candidate for president. They were really excited about Pigasus.19
Surveillance of left-wing activists and political groups was nothing new. Going back to the nineteenth century, law enforcement agencies, both local and federal, kept files on labor and union leaders, socialists, civil rights activists, and anyone suspected of having left-wing sympathies. The Los Angeles Police Department maintained a huge file on suspected communists, labor organizers, black leaders, civil rights groups, and celebrities. Every other major city in America had its own “Red Squad” and extensive files.20 Private companies and right-wing vigilante groups like the John Birch Society also maintained their own files on Americans. In the 1960s, private security contractor Wackenhut boasted of having two million Americans under surveillance.21 This information was shared freely with the FBI and police departments but was usually stored the old-fashioned way: on paper in filing cabinets. The US Army database was different. It had the backing of an unlimited Pentagon budget and access to the latest computer technology.
Pyle’s reporting revealed that CONUS Intel’s surveillance data were encoded onto IBM punch cards and fed into a digital computer located at the Army Counter Intelligence Corps center at Fort Holabird, which was equipped with a terminal link that could be used to access almost a hundred different information categories as well as print out reports on individual people. “The personality reports—to be extracted from the incident reports—will be used to supplement the Army’s seven million individual security clearance dossiers and to generate new files on the political activities of civilians wholly unassociated with the military,” he wrote in the Washington Monthly.22 “In this respect, the Army’s data bank promises to be unique. Unlike similar computers now in use at the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in Washington and New York State’s Identification and Intelligence System in Albany, it will not be restricted to the storage of case histories of persons arrested for, or convicted of, crimes. Rather it will specialize in files devoted exclusively to the descriptions of the lawful political activity of civilians.”
Big Data Totalitarianism
The late 1960s was the beginning of America’s computerization gold rush, a time when police departments, federal government agencies, military and intelligence services, and large corporations began to digitize their operations. They bought and installed computers, ran databases, crunched numbers, automated services, and linked computers via communication networks. Everyone was in a hurry to digitize, link up, and join the glorious computer revolution.23
Digital government databases popped up across the country.24 Naturally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation led the pack. It began building out a centralized digital database in 1967, by order of J. Edgar Hoover. Called the National Crime Information Center, it spanned all fifty states and was available to state and local law enforcement agencies. It contained information on arrest warrants, stolen vehicles and property, and gun registrations and was accessible via a dispatcher service. By the mid-1970s, the system was expanded to support keyboard terminals mounted in police cruisers for immediate data search and retrieval.25
As the FBI database grew, it interfaced and plugged into local law enforcement databases that were sprouting up around the country, systems like the one built in Bergen County, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. There, the sheriff and local police departments pooled resources to create the Regional Enforcement Information Network, a county-wide computerized database system that digitized and centralized law enforcement records of arrests, indictments, warrants, suspects, and stolen property information. The database was run on an IBM 360/40, and participating agencies could access it on local computer terminals. The system was linked to state police and FBI databases, which allowed local agencies to quickly call up county, state, and federal records.26
At the same time, multiple attempts were made to set up national data banks that would tie in and centralize all sorts of disparate data. They had names like “National Data Bank” and FEDNET.27 In 1967, the Bureau of the Budget wanted to build the National Data Center, a centralized federal database that would pull togethe
r, among other things, income tax and arrest records, health data, military draft status, social security information, and banking transactions and combine this information with a unique number that would serve both as a person’s lifelong identification number and permanent telephone number.28
Not just the cops and the feds rushed to computerize. Corporate America was an enthusiastic adopter of digital databases and networked computers to increase efficiency and bring down labor costs. Credit card companies, banks, credit rating bureaus, and airlines all began to digitize their operations, utilize centralized computer databases, and tap into the information via remote terminals.29
In 1964, American Airlines rolled out its first fully computerized registration and booking system, which was built by IBM and modeled after SAGE, America’s first early warning and air defense system, meant to guard against a sneak nuclear bombing raid by the Soviet Union. The airline’s system even had a similar name.30 SAGE stood for “Semi-Automatic Ground Environment”; the American Airlines system was called SABRE, which stood for “Semi-Automated Business-Related Environment.” Unlike SAGE, which was outdated the moment it came online because it could not intercept Soviet ballistic missiles, SABRE was a huge success. It connected more than a thousand Teletype machines to the company’s centralized computer located just north of New York City.31 The system not only promised to help American Airlines fill empty seats but also to “supply management with abundant information on day-to-day operations.” And that it did.
“From its first day of operation SABRE began accumulating reels of information, the most detailed information ever compiled on the travel patterns emanating from every major city—by destination, by month, by season, by day of the week, by hour of the day—information that in the right hands would become exceedingly valuable in the industry that American sought to dominate,” writes Thomas Petzinger Jr. in Hard Landing.32 With SABRE, American Airlines set up a monopoly on computerized bookings, and it later leveraged that power to crush its competition.33 Eventually, American Airlines spun the system off as a standalone company. Today, SABRE is still the number one travel booking system in the world, with ten thousand employees and revenues of $3 billion.34
The growth of all these databases did not go unnoticed. The dominant public fear at the time was that proliferation of corporate and government databases and networked computers would create a surveillance society—a place where every person was monitored and tracked, and where political dissent was crushed. Not just left-wing activists and student protesters worried.35 These concerns pervaded almost every layer of society. People feared government surveillance and corporate surveillance as well.
A 1967 cover story for the Atlantic Monthly exemplifies these fears. Written by a University of Michigan law professor named Arthur R. Miller, it mounts an attack on the push by both businesses and government agencies to centralize and computerize data collection. The story includes amazing cover art, showing Uncle Sam going berserk at the controls of a giant computer. It focuses on one proposed federal database in particular: the National Data Center, which would centralize personal information and connect it to a unique identification number for every person in the system.
Miller warned that such a database was a grave threat to political freedom. Once it was put in place, it would invariably grow to encompass every part of people’s lives:
The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications we are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time.…
The very existence of a National Data Center may encourage certain federal officials to engage in questionable surveillance tactics. For example, optical scanners—devices with the capacity to read a variety of type fonts or handwriting at fantastic rates of speed—could be used to monitor our mail. By linking scanners with a computer system, the information drawn in by the scanner would be converted into machine-readable form and transferred into the subject’s file in the National Data Center.
Then, with sophisticated programming, the dossiers of all of the surveillance subject’s correspondents could be produced at the touch of a button, and an appropriate entry—perhaps “associates with known criminals”—could be added to all of them. As a result, someone who simply exchanges Christmas cards with a person whose mail is being monitored might find himself under surveillance or might be turned down when he applies for a job with the government or requests a government grant or applies for some other governmental benefit. An untested, impersonal, and erroneous computer entry such as “associates with known criminals” has marked him, and he is helpless to rectify the situation. Indeed, it is likely that he would not even be aware that the entry existed.36
The Atlantic wasn’t alone. Newspapers, magazines, and television news programs of that time are filled with alarming reports about the growth of centralized databases—or “data banks,” as they were called back then—and the danger they posed to a democratic society.
In this fearful time, Christopher Pyle’s exposé exploded like a nuclear bomb. CONUS Intel was front-page news. Protests and outraged editorials followed, as did cover stories in just about every major news magazine in America. Television networks followed up on his reporting and carried out their own in-depth investigations. There were congressional queries to get to the bottom of the accusations.37
The most forceful investigation was led by Senator Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat with a bald head, thick bushy eyebrows, and fleshy bulldog jowls. Ervin was known as a moderate Southern Democrat, which meant that he consistently defended Jim Crow laws and the segregation of housing and schools and fought against attempts to secure equal rights for women. He was frequently called a racist, but he saw himself as a strict constitutionalist. He hated the federal government, which also meant he hated domestic surveillance programs.38
In 1971, Senator Ervin convened a series of hearings on Pyle’s revelations and recruited Pyle to help with the effort. Initially, the investigation focused narrowly on the army’s CONUS Intel program, but it quickly expanded to encompass a much bigger issue: the proliferation of government and corporate computer databases and surveillance systems.39 “These hearings were called because it is clear from the complaints being received by Congress that Americans in every walk of life are concerned about the growth of government and private records on individuals,” Senator Ervin said before the Senate in the dramatic opening statement for his investigation. “They are concerned about the growing collection of information about them which is none of the business of the collectors. A great telecommunications network is being created by the computer transmissions which crisscross our country every day.… Led on by the systems analysts, State and local governments are pondering ways of hooking their data banks and computers onto their Federal counter-parts, while Federal officials attempt to ‘capture’ or incorporate State and local data in their own data systems.”40
The first day of the hearings—which were titled “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights”—attracted a huge amount of news media coverage. “Senators Hear of Threat of a ‘Dossier Dictatorship,’” declared a front-page New York Times headline; the story shared space with one about the South Vietnamese bombing offensive into Laos.41 “The private life of the average American is the subject of 10 to 20 dossiers of personal information in the files and computer data banks of Government and private agencies… most Americans are only vaguely aware of the extent to which they are watched.”
Over the next several months Senator Ervin grilled Pentagon brass about the program, but he met stiff resistance. Defense officials stalled, ignored requests to provide witnesses, and refused to declassify evidence.42 The confrontations grew from a minor annoyance into a full-blown scandal, a
nd Senator Ervin threatened to publicly denounce the army’s surveillance program as unconstitutional and use his power to subpoena the necessary evidence and legally compel testimony if Pentagon representatives continued to be uncooperative. In the end, Senator Ervin’s efforts succeeded in shedding light on the scope of the military’s computerized domestic surveillance apparatus. His committee established that the US Army had amassed a powerful domestic intelligence presence and had “developed a massive system for monitoring virtually all political protest in the United States.” There were over 300 regional “records centers” nationwide, with many containing more than 100,000 cards on “personalities of interest.” By the end of 1970, a national defense intelligence center had 25 million files on individuals and 760,000 files on “organizations and incidents.” These files were full of lurid details—sexual preferences, extramarital affairs, and a particular emphasis on alleged homosexuality—things that had nothing to do with the task at hand: gathering evidence on people’s supposed ties to foreign governments and their participation in criminal plots.43 And, as the committee established, the Army Intelligence Command had several databases that could cross-reference this information and map out relationships between people and organizations.
Senator Sam Ervin’s committee confirmed something else as well: the army surveillance program was a direct extension of America’s bigger counterinsurgency strategy, which had been developed for use in foreign conflicts but which was immediately brought back and used on the home front. “The men who ran the domestic war room kept records not unlike those maintained by their counterparts in the computerized war rooms in Saigon,” noted a final report on Senator Ervin’s investigations.44