"FBI gives a glimpse of its most secret layer" by Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | March 29, 2010
WASHINGTON — It is where the government has hidden the most secret information: plans to relocate Congress if Washington were attacked, dossiers on double agents, case files about high-profile mob figures and their politician friends, and a disturbing number of reports about the possible smuggling of atomic bombs into the United States.
In our open and transparent democracy?
It is also where the bureau stowed documents considered more embarrassing than classified, including its history of illegal spying on domestic political organizations and surveillance of nascent gay rights groups.
Yeah, right, the poor gays.
PFFFFT!
Can't you guys put the agenda down for one f***ing second?
Let's see if they mention the ANTIWAR VICTIMS of the FBI's COINTELPRO!
It is the FBI’s “special file room,’’ where for decades sensitive material has been stored separately from the bureau’s central filing system to restrict access severely and, in more sinister instances, some experts assert, prevent the Congress and the public from getting their hands on it.
Established in 1948 under the reign of notoriously secretive FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, it remains in use today at FBI headquarters in Washington to safeguard what the bureau considers its most highly sensitive information.
But now, for the first time, the FBI has opened its doors — at least a crack — by releasing hundreds of pages of memos outlining why bureau officials have deemed certain information too hot to handle even for most top-level officials.
The memos, spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, were approved for release under the Freedom of Information Act and provided exclusively to the Globe by a researcher outside the FBI who wished to remain anonymous.
Many of the files that were kept there over the years, some designated with cryptic titles such as “raindrop’’ and “snitch-jacketing,’’ remain secret — if they haven’t been destroyed, as one former FBI official speculated.
Destroyed? Isn't that a crime?
You paid for those files, Americans.
Yet the internal memos discussing the file room and its contents provide a unique window into what the FBI considered some of the most serious domestic security threats, both real and imagined....
A majority of the files appear to be related to highly classified activities. Many are excluded from guidelines that require the government to declassify documents after a certain period of time.
Some subjects are considered so secret that even the bureaucratic machinations for putting them into the secret file room were blacked out — such as memos discussing the files about potential spies for China operating in the United States.
Anything about the Israeli spies in there?
In the early years of the Cold War, the FBI began placing thousands of other documents relating to security matters into the special file room, according to John Fox, the FBI’s official historian, and other specialists.
Stashed away were plans to conceal US radars designed to spy on the Soviet military, details of American war plans, and evacuation plans should Washington be attacked. There were several files on the possible threat of smuggled nuclear weapons, including one labeled “Atomic Bomb in Unknown Consul.’’
The room was filled with files on Americans believed to be spying for Russia, including Julius Rosenberg, who was executed for selling atomic bomb secrets, and Morton Sobell, an American engineer who spent nearly 18 years in prison for spying for the Soviet Union.
Some of the documents, meanwhile, indicate that the United States was spying on friends during the height of the Cold War. A number of files contained the diplomatic codes of Greece, Panama, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Sweden, and even neutral Switzerland, allowing the United States to read secret communications between their diplomats.
We still do. We spy on everyone, even our own citizens.
Others were more questionable in nature, such as numerous files from the 1950s and 1960s detailing the FBI’s spying on early gay rights groups such as The Mattachine Society, which in one 1958 memo was categorized under “internal security.’’
Homosexuality, in fact, was for a lengthy period an obsession of the bureau and the focus of multiple domestic intelligence operations, the memos show. Another file was spirited out of the regular bureau filing system because it involved “allegations of homosexuality of some very prominent individuals.’’
Like Hoover himself, right?
It added: “In view of the obscene nature of the allegations and the prominence of some individuals mentioned, therein, it is felt that this file should be retained in the Special File Room.’’
Who cares anymore?
Other files on domestic spying that were routed to the special file room involved “black nationalist extremists.’’ There were also files about an “extremely sensitive counterintelligence technique’’ called snitch-jacketing, which apparently involved the FBI spreading false information that members of a targeted group were government informants in order to sow conflict within their membership.
Yeah, they are STILL DOING THAT even now!
“Secrecy was the key,’’ said. “Knowledge is power.’’Athan G. Theoharis, a former professor at Marquette University and a specialist on the reign of Hoover, who served as the agency’s first director, from 1924 to 1972, and who is known to have maintained his own files that he ordered destroyed after his death, said.
The special filing location was even used to protect information about politicians believed to be involved with criminals.
So Hoover could blackmail them with it.
“The information is of a very sensitive nature in that it contains frequent reference to highly placed persons in Chicago law enforcement as well as city, county, and state political figures and their relations with the hoodlum element,’’ one 1960 memo stated, requesting a file be routed to the special room. “References are also made to prominent businessmen and occasionally newspaper reporters.’’
I knew they were criminals.
Longtime observers of the FBI say the memos are not just historically valuable, but also provide a roadmap for researchers who can now request some of the files cited in them, at least those with titles or file numbers that appear in the newly released documents. The memos will be posted at governmentattic.org, a website run by volunteers that publishes hundreds of government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
But according to Susan Rosenfeld, former FBI historian, many of them have been destroyed as part of regular housekeeping or are no longer stored at the FBI but at other government records centers.
Housekeeping?
I didn't see any antiwar movements mentioned, did you?
More secrets:
"Robot event offers glimpse of secret project" by Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff | March 28, 2010
Forget ropes, ladders, and superpowers. Engineers at Draper Laboratory are working on a project for the military that could allow soldiers to mimic the wall-climbing ability of Spider-Man — and the glass-clinging power of Gecko-Man, if only such a superhero existed.
Just read a Boston Globe; has me climbing the walls every day.
Enter Z-Man, the progeny of a Cambridge laboratory and a federal agency born in the Cold War to keep US military technology a step ahead of the Soviets.
The project is too sensitive to be discussed openly, but too exciting to be kept a secret. So the engineers working on it gave the public a peek at the technology at the FIRST Robotics Competition, a tournament of student-built, soccer-playing robots that drew thousands to Boston University’s Agganis Arena yesterday.
Beyond the mechanical goal-scoring, the colorfully dressed student competitors, and the boisterous cheering crowds, the Draper exhibit occupied a quiet corner of the concourse.
The Z-Man team was all but sworn to secrecy.
“I’m limited in what I can talk about to what’s on the poster,’’ said David J. Carter, a specialist in microelectromechanical systems and micro-optics who manages the Z-Man Program for Draper. What was on the poster was a picture of a gecko, a picture of a praying mantis, an enlarged photo of a human hair, and some text about how they climb. “I can’t say details about what has and hasn’t worked.’’
Set up around the bend from a pizza stand and beneath an action shot of former BU great Harry Agganis in his football uniform, the Z-Man engineers wowed passersby with two prototypes of the climbing technology....
The scant details about the project found in unclassified documents on the website of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was created in 1958 after the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik to keep the US military on the cutting edge of technology.
As one of the main sponsors of the Boston Regional FIRST Robotics tournament, Draper decided to offer this rare glimpse into the Z-Man Program to excite the students in attendance with one of the coolest “out of all the crazy cool things that Draper does,’’ said Ellen Avery, Draper’s community relations manager....
Yeah, indoctrinate the kids.
Goodbye, America.
But as a semisecret defense project, the Z-Man display was necessarily vague and limited. Carter spoke about the physics behind the technology, as a colleague demonstrated how easily the prototypes stuck and came off the vertical surfaces.
That at least suggested that human hands or feet could use the technology to scale vertical surfaces the same way — if Draper’s pads can be adapted to support the weight of a human. And if they can, look out for Z-Man.
Isn't he called Spiderman?
And some files I could not care less about:
"Family gets a say on FBI Kennedy file; Courtesy given to protect kin’s rights before release" by Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | April 12, 2010
WASHINGTON — Three FBI officials said the bureau has nearly completed its review of 3,000 pages of Edward M. Kennedy’s FBI file. Those pages constitute only the first installment in an unusually large collection of FBI documents about one of the most famous politicians in modern history, the heir to one of America’s most storied political dynasties, and the frequent source of fodder for the tabloids.
The FBI’s Record Information Dissemination Section, in Winchester, Va., began expediting requests for the file soon after Kennedy’s death at age 77 from brain cancer in August. Those requests were filed by the Globe and other news media under the Freedom of Information Act....
One informal adviser at this stage is Kenneth Feinberg, a former chief of staff to the late senator who managed the US fund to compensate the families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Now Feinberg is the Treasury Department’s “pay czar,’’ overseeing the compensation of executives at companies that have received federal bailout money.
Related: Executive Payday: Feinberg's Files
Overseeing the Cover-Ups: From JFK to 9/11
Then I'm not going to be interested in what salaciousness they release about Ted.
Feinberg, who is also chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, confirmed that he has had private discussions about the Kennedy family’s potential role in the release of the FBI file but said he was not authorized to discuss publicly any details....
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