The Dangers of Dissent

While most studies of the FBI focus on the long tenure of Director J. Edgar Hoover (1924-1972), The Dangers of Dissent shifts the ground to the recent past. The book examines FBI practices in the domestic security field through the prism of "political policing." The monitoring of dissent is exposed, as are the Bureau's controversial "counterintelligence" operations designed to disrupt political activity. This book reveals that attacks on civil liberties focus on a wide range of domestic critics on both the Left and the Right. This book traces the evolution of FBI spying from 1965 to the present through the eyes of those under investigation, as well as through numerous FBI documents, never used before in scholarly writing, that were recently declassified using the Freedom of Information Act or released during litigation (Greenberg v. FBI). Ivan Greenberg considers the diverse ways that government spying has crossed the line between legal intelligence-gathering to criminal action. While a number of studies focus on government policies under George W. Bush's "War on Terror," Greenberg is one of the few to situate the primary role of the FBI as it shaped and was reshaped by the historical context of the new American Surveillance Society.

Ivan Greenberg is a former adjunct instructor in the City University of New York college system and is currently an independent scholar.

1 Introduction
Chapter 2 1. State Crimes
3 "Counter-Intelligence" Methods
4 The FBI Encourages Violence
5 Advice on Fighting Repression
6 "Testilying" and Falsification
Chapter 7 2. The Evolution of Seventies Spying
8 COINTELPRO Aims and Ends
9 Congressional Questioning
10 Surveillance of the Left
11 Senate Church Committee
12 Black Bag Jobs
13 Carter Appoints a New Director
Chapter 14 3. Has the FBI Really Changed?
15 Reagan Revives Spying
16 Spying on the Nuclear Freeze Movement
17 Spying on African-American Elected Officials
18 Surveillance of Right-wing Groups
Chapter 19 4. The Need for Enemies after the Cold War
20 Enemies at the Millennium
21 Peace Dividend
22 Who are the Terrorists?
Chapter 23 5. The Terror Scare
24 Denver, New York City
25 "October Plan"
26 Violations, Watch Lists and Databases
Chapter 27 6. Information Flow and Political Policing
28 FBI Power and the FOIA
29 Early Lawsuits
30 Police Legitimacy
31 Concealing the Identities of Informers
32 The Privacy Act
Chapter 33 7. Suing the FBI for Spying
34 Old Left Plaintiffs
35 Race and the FBI
36 New Left Plaintiffs
37 Plaintiffs Losses
38 Post-COINTELPRO Cases
Chapter 39 8. The FBI in the Surveillance Society