The new surveillance

Jacob Appelbum, pictured, is a well-known security expert

Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project and Wikileaks addressing the European Parliament on the issue of surveillance:

When Obama says that we don't need to be afraid, first of all, it's insulting to every single one of you in the room. When he says to Americans "Don't worry, we don't spy on Americans." I think "What about every other human being on this planet?"

And I apologize on behalf of my incredibly insulting President for saying that about each and every one of you, because that is not acceptable. He's also wrong, because in my experience with Wikileaks, Americans actually have more to be afraid of.

26 years after his death, gay civil rights activist and former YCLer honored

Though he was chief strategist for King's march, Bayard Rustin was kept in the background as some organizers considered him a liability. He died in 1987, and is sometimes forgotten in civil rights history

Gary Younge
Friday 23 August 2013
Reprinted from the UK newspaper The Guardian
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When civil rights leaders met at the Roosevelt Hotel in Harlem in early July 1963 to hammer out the ground rules by which they would work together to organise the March on Washington there was really only one main sticking point: Bayard Rustin.

Rustin, a formidable organiser and central figure in the civil rights movement, was a complex and compelling figure. Raised a Quaker, his political development would take him through pacifism, communism, socialism and into the civil rights movement in dramatic fashion. In 1944, after refusing to fight in World War Two, he had been jailed as a conscientious objector. It was primarily through him that the leadership would adopt non-violent direct action not only as a strategy but a principle. "The only weapons we have is our bodies," he once said. "And we have to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn."

Rustin was also openly gay, an attribute which was regarded as a liability in the early sixties in a movement dominated by clerics. His position became particularly vulnerable following his arrest in Pasadena, in 1953, when he was caught having sex with two men in a parked car. Charged with lewd vagrancy he plead out to a lesser 'morals charge' and was sent to jail for 60 days.

Some in the room that day believed all this made him too great a liability to be associated with such a high profile event. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, was candid. "I don't want you leading that march on Washington, because you know I don't give a damn about what they say, but publicly I don't want to have to defend the draft dodging," he said. "I know you're a Quaker, but that's not what I'll have to defend. I'll have to defend draft dodging. I'll have to defend promiscuity. The question is never going to be homosexuality, it's going to be promiscuity and I can't defend that. And the fact is that you were a member of the Young Communist League. And I don't care what you say, I can't defend that."

Wilkins did not get his way. Rustin would lead the march and do so brilliantly while Wilkins would be called upon to defend him and do so. Fifty years on the White House has announced that Bayard Rustin will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. The award marks the end of a journey for Rustin, who died in 1987: from marginalisation in both life and history to mainstream official accolade just in time for the 50th anniversary of arguably his crowning achievement – organising the march on Washington.

By the time the march was proposed, writes John D'Emilio, author of Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin: "He had recently turned 50. He was still waiting for his day in the limelight, though likely believing it would never come. Prejudice of another sort, still not named as such in mid-century America, had curtailed his opportunities and limited his effectiveness."

With a vertical mop of salt-and-pepper hair and his tie hung loose on his chest, Rustin always cut a distinctive figure. The idea for a march on Washington had been hatched by his long term mentor, A Philip Randolph, who was 20 years his senior. But there had been few takers from the civil rights movement for a national march until demonstrations erupted in Birmingham in Spring.

Demonstrations in Washington DC are now a common occurrence but what Randolph and Rustin were proposing was audacious – 100,000 protesters descending on the Capitol – unprecedented.

The following eight weeks, writes D'Emilio, "were the busiest in Rustin's life. He had to build an organization out of nothing. He had to assemble a staff and shape them into a team able to perform under intense pressure. He had to craft a coalition that would hang together despite organizational competition, personal animosities and often antagonistic politics. He had to manoeuvre through the mine field of an opposition that ranged from liberals who were counselling moderation to segregationists out to sabotage the event. And he had to do all of this while staying enough out of the public eye so that the liabilities he carried would not undermine his work."

The headquarters for this extraordinary endeavour was a rented, run down former church on West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The building soon resembled a cross between a student union in occupation and a military headquarters on high alert. "It was very exciting and frenetic," says Rachelle Horowitz, the march's transport chief who was also Rustin's long-time assistant. "It ran on adrenalin and excitement with everybody working from early in the morning 'til late into the night. It was very collegial, very primitive and very egalitarian."

As such it was a tribute to Rustin's eccentric, hyperactive, and efficient personality. He was in constant motion, interrupting conversations to answer phones even as he passed notes to staff, doodled and chain-smoked. "I had had many differences with Bayard in the past and was destined to have more differences with him in the future," recalled the late civil rights leader James Farmer in his autobiography. "But I must say that I have never seen such a difficult task of coordination performed with more skill and deftness."

Throughout that time as the coalition supporting the march grew, so the nature of the March would change, diluting it of much of its more militant elements even as the prospective size was bolstered. As Rustin announced the abandonment of each new aspect, his young staff would berate him, partly in jest, partly in frustration. "We'd shout: 'Oh Bayard, you're turning it into a circus!'" Horowitz told me with a laugh.

Ever the coalition builder, Rustin explained: "What you have to understand is that the march will succeed if it gets 100,000 people – or 150,000 or 200,000 or more – to show up in Washington. It will be the biggest rally in history. It will show the Black community united as never before – united also with whites from labor and the churches, from all over the country." 250,000 people would ultimately be there.

It was precisely this ability to see the big picture while keeping an eye on details like the number of toilets necessary and the kind of sandwiches people should pack (they advised against using mayonnaise since the heat could spoil it and cause diarrhea) that encouraged Randolph to defend him that day against Wilkin's attacks.

For while Wilkins' manner may have been abrasive, his concerns were routine at the time. Shortly before he died, Farmer explained to me how he vetted people for the Freedom Rides in 1961. "We had to screen them very carefully because we knew that if they found anything to throw at us, they would throw it. We checked for Communists, homosexuals, drug addicts. They had to be 21 or over, and have the approval of their parents. I personally interviewed people, and then would talk to their friends."

When Randolph insisted on Rustin, Wilkins retorted: "You can take that on if you want. But don't expect me to do anything about it when the trouble starts."

The trouble came to a head less than a month before the march when segregationist senator Strom Thurmond took to the Senate floor to brand Rustin a "Communist, draft-dodger and homosexual," entering into the congressional record a picture of Rustin talking to King while King was in a bathtub. But the attack came too late and from too poisoned a well to have any impact beyond rallying support for Rustin even from Wilkins. "I'm sure there were some homophobes in the movement," said activist Eleanor Holmes. "But you knew how to behave when Strom Thurmond attacked."

History turned out to be kinder to Rustin than it was to Thurmond. On Thurmond's death it transpired that the whole time he was railing against integration he had a black daughter by a family maid. Rustin, meanwhile, will now be honoured at a time when gay equality has majority support by a black president in his second term.

"We are a people," wrote Alice Walker in her essay, Zora Neale Hurston: a Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View. "A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone."

Book review: So many reds, so many beds...

The Fruit Machine, used by the RCMP until 1969

Reprinted from Geist magazine
By Daneil Francis

During the 1950s the RCMP security service employed a machine to root out homosexuals working for the federal government. Individuals suspected of being gay were hooked up to this bogus device, the so-called “fruit machine,” and exposed to pornographic images. Their physiological responses were assessed and a sexual identity conferred. Once identified, homosexuals were purged from the public service.

Ostensibly it was the Mounties’ job to look for Communist spies, but since homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail because of their illicit lifestyle, they too represented a risk to the security of the state, or so the argument went. More than one hundred civil servants lost their jobs because of the “gay squad,” which expanded its efforts beyond the civil service by opening files on thousands of gays across the country.

Clearly it was homosexuality that was being policed, not subversion.

In their new book Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (University of Toronto Press), the historians Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey and Andrew Parnaby describe the fruit machine as “the single looniest venture” in the history of the security service. But they had a lot to choose from. What their book reveals is that any Canadian who has ever held unorthodox political views or even led what might be considered an unorthodox lifestyle could take it for granted that the government was watching.

(Link to a CBC story about the Fruit Machine - RY eds)

The origins of this intrusive surveillance go all the way back to Confederation, when John A. Macdonald placed Gilbert McMicken in charge of a force of special agents to keep a watchful eye on the activities of Fenian sympathizers along the Canada–US border. But the surveillance state really got organized at the end of World War I, when the Royal North West Mounted Police was remodelled as an internal security force—the modern RCMP—and deployed to spy on labour leaders and left-wing agitators who the government believed were plotting a Bolshevik revolution in Canada.

In the 1930s the security service was asked to fulfill Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s promise that he would grind Communism under “the heel of ruthlessness.” It was “open season on Communists and suspected Communists,” write Whitaker et al., as the political police rounded up hundreds of radicals and even deported a number who were recent immigrants. “They simply came and took him away,” said the wife of one of the men. “They had no right to do such a thing.”

Picking up the story two decades later, our authors call the 1950s “the deepest Ice Age of the Cold War.” It was not just homosexuals that the RCMP singled out for persecution; they also encouraged purges of the National Film Board, the foreign service, labour unions and universities. In a variety of ways, write Whitaker et al., public policy was made hostage to “Cold War fantasies.” Worse, they present a portrait of a country “honeycombed with secret informers,” people who were not attached to the secret service but gladly helped spy on their friends and associates on its behalf.

“What is quite extraordinary about the vast collection of dossiers on Canadians and Canadian organizations… is the amount of complicity shown by large numbers of people in police surveillance of their own associations and activities.” To a disturbing extent, we had become a nation of spies, and by the early 1980s the security service had compiled files on ten thousand suspected subversives and had made plans to round up and incarcerate them in the event of an unspecified “national emergency.” The authors do not go so far, but the picture of Cold War Canada that emerges from the pages of their book seems every bit as sinister as East Germany under the Stasi.

This is the hidden history of the RCMP, which until 1984 had responsibility for secret policing. Much of the story is already known, though Secret Service brings it together in a convenient and compelling synthesis. But it is hidden in the sense that it contradicts so much of what the public is asked to believe about the Mounties: that they are the stalwart defenders of law and justice; that they are respecting our rights, not undermining them; that they make the country a safer place. This version of the Mountie has been purveyed for years in movies, histories, tourist brochures, comic books and novels.

Famously, the force even hired out its image-making to the Disney Corporation. The result of all this massaging and spin-doctoring has left Canadians thinking that our souvenir police force was on our side. Yet behind the scenes, which is where Secret Service takes its readers, the RCMP’s agents have been violating the rights of Canadians from the very beginning of the force.

It was in Quebec where the RCMP security service finally came a cropper. During the 1960s and ’70s, agents engaged in a series of “dirty tricks” aimed at sovereigntists in that province. They broke into journalists’ offices to steal documents; they opened mail; they stockpiled dynamite to use in furtive operations to discredit separatists; they stole records from the Parti Québécois, a perfectly legitimate political party [sic]; they fabricated communiqués from the Front de Libération du Québec; and so on.

All this illegal, clandestine activity eventually led to a Royal Commission, which in turn persuaded the federal government to transfer responsibility for national security policing from a discredited RCMP to a new agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in 1984. Which didn’t end the RCMP’s problematic involvement in terrorism matters. In 2002, when the Americans kidnapped Maher Arar, a Canadian computer engineer, and sent him to Syria to be tortured, it turned out to have been the RCMP that provided the dubious “evidence” on which the Americans had acted. (Arar was later exonerated and received an apology from the Canadian government, along with $10.5 million.)

CSIS has had its own problems, of course. Whitaker et al. call the cock-up over the 1985 Air India bombing “the worst intelligence failure in Canadian history.” But Secret Service is not simply a chronicle of police scandals and mistakes. As befits academics, the authors are extremely judicious in their treatment of individual incidents, and the result is a thorough, even-handed catalogue of most of the major security-related cases in Canada down to the present post-9/11 world. Few would argue—certainly Whitaker and his colleagues do not—that there is no role for security policing to protect Canadians from foreign espionage and terrorist violence. However, what the history shows is that as often as not, it is the police who have been the subversives, violating the rights of innocent individuals and legitimate organizations whose only “crime” was to challenge the status quo.

The seeds of fascism

[T]he deepening economic and systemic crisis of capitalism not only takes the form of increasing militarization and war. It also finds expression in the stepped-up state attack on the democratic rights of the people. Whether in the form of overt repression(police attacks on picket lines and street demonstrations), or through less crude or obvious legal-judicial means (use of court injunctions, wilful manipulation of the electoral process, etc.), or the promotion of ultra-right, racist and neo-fascist groupings or even paramilitary units, the class purpose remains the same: to stifle the democratic expressions and aspirations of the masses, to weaken the labour and democratic fightback, and to silence and, where necessary, crush anti-capitalist dissent. As we have pointed out in previous documents, genuine democracy is anathema to capitalist rule (and vice versa) and as the systemic crisis deepens and the class struggle correspondingly grows in intensity, the ruling class will use every means at its disposal to maintain its hegemony, stripping away even those democratic rights afforded under bourgeois democracy and, as a last resort, imposing fascist rule.While we have not arrived at fascism –the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism – the seeds of fascism have been laid by monopoly capital and its governments, and are beginning to sprout.The only antidote to the dangerous drift to state authoritarianism or fascism is the mobilization of all the pro-democratic forces, anchored by a strong, united, conscious and militant movement of labour and its closest allies, and with a strong and influential presence of the Communists...

Political Report of the Central Committee of the CPC, November 2010