The Threat to American Civil Liberties

Frustrated Americans take to the street in opposition to the actions of the Federal government. The President casts everyday Americans as pawns of foreign interests. He deploys National Guard units and other Federal forces to quell the protests, which only further inflames the situation. Inevitably, American citizens are shot dead by those same forces.

While the above actions can serve as a depiction of the situation in our country today, they also recount the events of the late 1960’s and early 70’s during the administration of President Richard Nixon. These earlier incidents included nationwide mass demonstrations and the deadly shooting of four students and the wounding of nine others at Kent State University by Ohio National Guard troops. Then, as now, actions by the Federal government posed a grave threat to the civil liberties of the American people. What remains to be seen is whether the other two, coequal branches of the Federal government, will fulfill their constitutional responsibility to rein in an out-of-control Executive.

In my prior role as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, I was responsible for the policy oversight of several protective programs to include the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Counterintelligence (CI) activities. The department’s CI activities were primarily directed toward protecting DoD’s intelligence activities from our nation’s foreign adversaries. A key area of my focus was ensuring that the DoD did not repeat the abuses of the late 1960’s when U.S. Army CI assets engaged in domestic data collection and surveillance. Then, as now, the U.S. military was deployed in American cities to quell unrest. Then, as now, the Federal government spied on everyday Americans to identify those it believed to be a threat.

Beginning with the Watts riot in 1965, U.S. military forces, both National Guard and active duty, were increasingly deployed domestically, culminating in deployments in scores of American cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Beginning in 1967, the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC) began a massive and unauthorized program directed at collecting data and exercising surveillance over thousands of American citizens. The program was known as Continental United States Intelligence, or CONUS Intel.

At its peak, the U.S. Army deployed up to 1,500 CI agents, usually in civilian clothes, to surveil groups of as few as 20 Americans. It was later estimated that upwards of a 100,000 Americans were the subject of Army CI files. In January 1970, Christopher Pyle, a former USAINTC captain published a series of articles in a magazine revealing the existence of the military’s domestic spying network. In response to an attempt by the U.S. Army to cover up such activities, Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative senator from North Carolina, who later rose to fame during the Senate investigation into the Nixon Watergate scandal, held a series of hearings intended to highlight how the U.S. Army’s domestic surveillance threatened the liberties of everyday Americans. As a result of the pressure generated by these hearings, the Army eventually destroyed most of its civil disturbance files, and the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was dissolved on June 30, 1974. Many of its functions were transferred to the Defense Investigative Service, an organization within which I served early in my career as a Federal civil servant. Ervin’s hearings eventually contributed to the bipartisan Church Committee hearings, which exposed additional abuses by the Federal government’s intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, and FBI, to conduct illegal surveillance on American citizens.

The Church Committee hearings precipitated a series of reforms culminating in the initial issuance of Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities, by President Ronald Regan in 1981. In part, this order is intended to fulfill the “solemn obligation” of the Federal government “to protect fully the legal rights of all United States persons, including freedoms, civil liberties, and privacy rights guaranteed by Federal law,” when engaging in intelligence collection.

In a direct repeat of the government’s abuse of everyday American’s civil liberties, Federal agents are once again collecting data and conducting surveillance of its citizens. In Minneapolis, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are using facial recognition technology to identify and track U.S. citizens simply for exercising their Constitutional rights. Reportedly, ICE is also using cellphone and social media tools to monitor American’s online activity and potentially hack into phones. With repeated threats by the President to deploy active-duty troops to American cities, it is not difficult to imagine that the military’s CI assets will be tasked with force protection responsibilities intended to identify threats on the ground. What is clear is that the current administration sees those threats to include everyday American citizens exercising their First and Second Amendment Constitutional rights.

Both Congress and the Federal courts, the two coequal branches of our Constitutional form of government, have a solemn obligation to expose and bring to a halt the blatant violation of American civil liberties by agents of the Executive branch. This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. Much the same way the two parties came together during the Ervin and Church committee hearings to expose and halt the abuses of the Nixon administration, the American people of all persuasions must be protected from Executive branch overreach by the Trump administration. Whenever some Americans’ civil liberties are threatened, all Americans’ liberties are threatened.

J. William Leonard is the Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Security & Information Operations), Former Director, Information Security Oversight Office and Former Chief Operating Officer, National Endowment for Democracy. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.