Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a crowd and delivered a speech that — to this day — defines American history. He preached a doctrine of love, equality and freedom. He condemned the discrimination that black Americans had to bear and the freedoms they were denied. Although many advances have been made to restore the freedoms of American minorities, I realize how disappointed Dr. King would be with the current policies limiting Americans’ civil rights. Dr. King committed his life to reporting the nation’s injustices to the government to, in his words, “cash a check” for the justice that black Americans rightfully deserved as citizens.
Many have been victimized by governmental programs that reflect the very discrimination Dr. King fought so vehemently against. Individuals have, at some point, been spied on by the National Security Agency regardless of their ethnicity, religion or skin color. The now not-so-secret PRISM program has been collecting the communications of thousands of Internet users in America and those interacting with them abroad. This information, revealed to the world by former CIA and NSA analyst Edward Snowden, shed light on the unacceptable transgression on the privacy rights of Americans. After disclosing this information, Snowden fled his home country to avoid prosecution by the American government. The invasion of privacy, I’ve found, goes a long way back in our history. I was shocked to discover that a similar scandal preceded the NSA’s recent indiscretion. I was even more shocked to find that this “incident” was not only government-led, but inspired by Dr. King’s campaign 50 years ago.
The program, launched in the late 50s and later headed by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was titled “COINTELPRO” (Counterintelligence Program), and it came into play as a result of King’s growing national presence after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Hoover declared King a danger to the nation and installed microphones in every hotel he visited. Eventually, Dr. King’s phone was also wiretapped. Not only did the FBI use this data to prevent other organizations from financing or becoming affiliated with Dr. King’s movement, but it also gathered enough personal information to extort Dr. King and attempt to shut down his campaign several times.
It wasn’t until 1976 when the Senate’s “Church Committee,” headed by Senator Frank Church, revealed COINTELPRO’s abusive, unlawful operations to the public, inspiring the government to take serious measures to protect the constitutional rights of citizens. For instance, the right to “peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances,” protected by the First Amendment, was crucial to the civil rights movement and indispensable to present and future political groups.
The First Amendment’s right of association and the Fourth Amendment’s right to protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” were unquestionably violated by PRISM. Internationally, PRISM has also been accused of violating the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights; for instance, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits any “arbitrary interference with [a person’s] privacy, family, home or correspondence.”
Senator Church took the opportunity to warn Americans about the government’s potentially abusive surveillance programs, saying, “The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left; such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.” Little did he know in 1975 that today nearly all our information is stored in servers that outmaneuver the telegrams and land lines of his time.
It’s worrisome to realize that any governmental program monitoring the citizens has more power today than it did in Dr. King’s time; nearly all our personal information today is digitized, making it even easier for these programs to access everything there is to know about us. We now know that the American government has the power to monitor everything we do. I cannot help but wonder if the civil rights movement would have succeeded at all if it had taken place today, in a world of digital communications and powerful spying programs.
According to an article published last week on Bloomberg, a shocking “56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans who weren’t suspected of having links to terrorism” were spied on by the NSA from 2008 to 2011. Nine of the world’s major international civil liberties groups have already spoken up for all the individuals (non-Americans included) who have seen some of their universal civil rights transgressed by the NSA; Internet companies and unions have joined the fight against PRISM, making a total of 86 groups that have already joined the alliance.
Now is the time to remember the heroes like Dr. King, who fought for justice regardless of the consequences, and determine whether or not his efforts will live on into our future or fall back into the past. A dream is only a dream until somebody decides to act upon it. It’s up to us, future generations, to understand “the fierce urgency of now” and the importance of fighting together until we, as a people, see our “freedom ring” (Martin Luther King Jr., 1963).
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Follow Maria Prada on Twitter: @chuzac
As published in the Sept. 5 issue of the Pepperdine Graphic.
