GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE: U.S. HAS LONG HISTORY OF WATCHING WHITE HOUSE CRITICS AND JOURNALISTS - Newsweek

Newsweek published this story about a presidential commission report on the C.I.A.'s domestic activities under the headline of “Who's Watching Whom” on June 23, 1975. In light of recent events, Newsweek is republishing the story.
Properly cautious in its restraint, frustratingly spotty in its detail and with a tone predictably more defensive than damning, the Rockfeller commission's long-awaited report on the CIA is clearly no whitewash. It does pull some punches, not always identifying responsible CIA officials or their prime domestic "targets," and accepting with apparent equanimity the absence or admitted destruction of important evidence. But the report also acknowledges serious violations of criminal law and congressional authority in the CIA's use of bugs, break-ins and wiretaps, the interception of mail and telephone communications, Secret experiments with drugs - and an ominous array of projects that fished for and filed away information on law-abiding U.S. citizens.

The report's most jolting disclosure is the story of Operation CHAOS and associated CIA snooping on domestic dissidents that flowered under the demands of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Both Presidents wanted to know more about the racial and antiwar disturbances that swept the nation in the late 1960s, and particularly whether the activists received foreign support or direction.Increasingly aggressive efforts by CIA undercover agents and analysts never turned up evidence of significant foreign influence, according to the Rockfeller report, but they did amass "a veritable mountain of material" on the doings of American dissidents. 

MAIL-READING AND PHONE-TAPPING
At least one secret-surveillance technique used by CHAOS - the wholesale interception and opening of Americans' mail had been a CIA tactic for years, despite explicit fears that the illegal operation might cause the agency "the worst possible publicity and embarrassment" if discovered. The Rockfeller report traced the program back to the cold-war '50s and placed the operation primarily in New York City, with short-term interceptions also taking place in San Francisco, Hawaii and New Orleans. - More

Government Surveillance: U.S. Has Long History of Watching White

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