Whose National Security?

Gary Kinsman, Mercedes Steedman, Dieter K. Buse

• Editorial: Between the Lines
• Año: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781926662749
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Inteligencia y espionaje

Would you believe that RCMP operatives used to spy on Tupperware parties? In the 1950s and ’60s they did. They also monitored high school students, gays and lesbians, trade unionists, left-wing political groups, feminists, consumer’s associations, Black activists, First Nations people, and Quebec sovereignists.

The establishment of a tenacious Canadian security state came as no accident. On the contrary, the highest levels of government and the police, along with non-governmental interests and institutions, were involved in a concerted campaign. The security state grouped ordinary Canadians into dozens of political stereotypes and labelled them as threats.

Whose National Security? probes the security state’s ideologies and hidden agendas, and sheds light on threats to democracy that persist to the present day. The contributors’ varied approaches open up avenues for reconceptualizing the nature of spying.

Including:

* "APEC Days at UBC: Student Protests and National Security in an Era of Trade Liberalization, " Karen Pearlston* "Remembering Federal Police Surveillance in Quebec, 1940s-70s, " Madeleine Parent* "The Red Petticoat Brigade: Mine Mill Women's Auxiliaries and the Threat from Within, 1940s-70s, " Mercedes Steedman* "Spymasters, Spies, and their Subjects: The RCMP and Canadian State Repression, 1914-39, " Gregory S. Kealey* "In Whose Public Interest? The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and National Security, " Evert Hoogers

PART I

ORIGINS OF THE NATIONAL

(IN)SECURITY STATE

DIETER K. BUSE

one

Observing the Political and Informing on the Personal: State Surveillance Systems in a European Context

Spying on opponents has a long, but not an honourable, history. Some countries have taken their penchant for espionage to extreme heights—or, perhaps better, depths—and many people in general remain unaware of the extent and nature of state surveillance. For instance, the incredible extent of spying on political opponents and informing on private life in the German Democratic Republic became known only after the East German state collapsed in 1989/90. That state’s system of monitoring citizens and informing on all aspects of personal life—work done even by friends and relatives—generated over two hundred kilometres of personnel files by the Stasi, the state security office.¹ Closer to home, in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enlisted more than three hundred informers, paying them $1.6 million between 1960 and 1976, to spy on three thousand members of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group. In that case, the FBI also used more than one thousand additional unpaid informers.²

The extent of secret police observing and informing—as well as its nature and other specifics—has for the most part not been well known, especially in supposedly democratic states. In Canada, for example, a television program aired in early 1998 on the misuse of psychiatry for state security reasons.³ At issue were events in Montreal during the 1950s, when functionaries in a psychiatric clinic were secretly observing mentally and emotionally distressed persons. The institute director, Dr. Ewen Cameron, later head of the American Psychological Association, was reporting to state agencies on the effects of reprogramming minds. In this case observation supposedly undertaken to help patients medically gave way to observation for state purposes. Privacy and medical confidentiality were being violated for the political use of a foreign security agency, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1977 the CIA acknowledged that “more than 80 institutions including 44 colleges or universities, and 185 non-government researchers were used in the tests,” and former officials of the Allan Memorial Institute revealed the CIA funding.⁴ The ultimate purpose of this attempt to get into the deepest recesses of citizen minds in the facility’s “Sleep Room” remained the same as in all forms of surveillance: the state and its allies sought ever more ways to find out about and to control its citizens.⁵

The extremes in surveillance need to be placed in historical perspective, especially since Canada, like the United States, had only very small foreign and domestic intelligence systems before the twentieth century. Many of the present forms of state surveillance date from the nineteenth century. In Britain, in response to the threat of revolt and organized protests by workers during the early industrial era, the Home Office set up a system of spying to watch machine-breakers (or Luddites), union organizers, and those who questioned the enclosure of common land. E.P. Thompson used those spy reports in his classic study on the making of the English working class.⁶ Similarly repressive, and partly in response to the ideas that the French Revolution of 1789 had spread throughout Europe, the Russian Ochrinka, or secret police department, was established under Nicholas I in 1826 to monitor liberals and other “radicals,” and many others besides.⁷ About the same time, Prince Metternich’s Austrian regime established a surveillance system and sent out informers, especially among university students and middle-class radicals seeking to end the strictures (censorship, controlled meetings, and regulations on political groups) of re-established absolutism after 1815. Much of the limited and haphazard Central European domestic surveillance system came to light in studies on the European Revolutions of 1848. Ironically, the new governments that attained power in 1848 continued and expanded the spy system so that their state security decrees “demanded no less than the general surveillance of all political societies by the police.”⁸ Even earlier, the eighteenth-century absolutist French state had developed an extensive secret police system to spy on its main Enlightenment “opponents,”⁹ who undertook such “subversive” measures as publishing encyclopedias and philosophizing on the nature of humans. The strong central state tradition in France resulted in a continuous attempt to watch radicals and dissenters no matter who directed that state or what form it took throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁰

After the suppression of the Revolutions of 1848 surveillance systems became more structured. For instance, the secret police organizations of the various German states collaborated to share information on supposed radicals during the 1850s.¹¹ Towards the end of the century all the ministries of the interior of Europe were exchanging information on “anarchists, terrorists and socialists.”¹² By then nearly every state had a formalized system of collecting, collating, and reporting information on its real and supposed opponents.

By the end of the nineteenth century most European states were not only collecting information on the political left, but also placing under scrutiny far-right radicals and individuals whose loyalty to the state was considered ambivalent (including prominent Jews in Germany and France). Whether republican or absolute monarchist, the form of state mattered little in the elite’s perception of possible left-wing threats to the state and society, and in country after country the political or secret police cast a fine net. For instance, in his research on just one large German city, Hamburg, Richard J. Evans found twenty thousand political reports for the period 1892–1914.¹³ The reports came mainly from informers dressed as workers. These special undercover police reported on the public mood by noting what workers said about almost everything: work, unemployment, rents, religion, crime, police, social democracy, unions, imperialism, foreigners, and militarism. In addition to those special constables’ pub surveillance, Hamburg’s regular political, that is, secret, police systematically collected information on “anarchists and socialists” by keeping dossiers on speakers. They kept records of significant events such as May Day parades and trade union festivals, and gathered information on leftist newspapers, leading personalities, and organizations and clubs associated with Social Democracy. The resulting dossiers numbered in the thousands, and the findings were shared with the Prussian and national counterparts of the Hamburg police.

This type of widespread surveillance became the norm for the modern state in Europe and North America, despite a wide diversity of ideology among the elites. The systems developed usually comprised a central set of personnel files and another set of quarterly and annual summaries. The summaries usually covered each major region or political division of the country. Topping this layered cake of information was an annual situational summary for the whole country drawing upon the local reports and the detailed surveillance of individuals, events, and movements. To provide the information, local police officers worked with informers, collaborators from among the citizenry, and institutions such as the military and churches. Such systems for collecting and collating information became the norm within nearly all European state hierarchies, with the collected surveillance results passed from hand to hand up a bureaucratic ladder. What would change over time was the thoroughness of the spying, some of the technology employed, the professionalization of the police spies, the types of informers, how they infiltrated targeted groups, and the increased diversity of the targets of surveillance. But the bureaucratic model with its pattern of collecting and passing information would remain intact.

These secret police systems and surveillance primarily originated in attempts to gauge the strength and nature of political opponents. During the nineteenth century the secrecy surrounding the establishment and growth of these bureaucracies meant that little public discussion occurred on who was targeted or why. Some individuals, such as the late-nineteenth-century German Social Democratic leader August Bebel, knew they were being followed and their activities monitored. Noticing that one policeman was observing him quite frequently, Bebel called him his “little poodle.”¹⁴ Such lampooning of shoddy police methods by the Social Democrats slurred over what they wanted discussed in the weak German parliament: the fundamental issue of citizenship and political rights.

The French and German systems of surveillance, just as in other parts of Europe and North America, were originally set up and operated in secret. Only a select part of the state’s officials knew the extent of the spying (not dissimilar to post-World War II Canada or East Germany). Few limits were set to infiltration, and the spies mostly followed the demands of their arbitrary and undemocratic masters. Whether in parliamentary Britain or autocratic Russia, an implicit model seems to have existed in the minds of the European elites: the state represented the mainstream of society, and anyone who sought change was considered to be on the fringe or influenced by foreigners. As Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed about the German Social Democrats, they were in his eyes people “without a fatherland.” For the elites, who saw themselves as representing the law-abiding centre of society and equated opposition primarily with the political aspirations of labour, unions, and the left, especially socialists and anarchists, obtaining public support or parliamentary legitimacy for secret surveillance was not an issue. Though the ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Origins of the National (In)Security State
• Part II: Defining a Security Threat: Three Examples
• Part III: Education under Cover
• Part IV: Redefining a Security Threat: Newer Enemies
• Part V: The Machinery of State in Action: Means and Consequences
• Part VI: Finding Security in the Archives
• Part VII: Old Methods and Recent Trends
• Part VIII: The Continuing Surveillance State
• Index