Undermining free speech

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I remember the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, who urgently believed that Americans actively protesting against government policies, including those of the FBI, required surveillance and chilling visitations by its agents to counsel them that certain speech resulted in unpleasant consequences for them. Current intimidation of protesters by Robert Mueller's FBI brings back my memories of the 1950s and 1960s.

Back then, FBI agents came to see me, demanding the sources for my criticisms of the Bureau. Knowing my First Amendment rights, I politely sent them away. They did not return.

These days, however, FBI agents before last month's Democratic convention and this week's Republican convention have -- with particular zeal, as described in an Aug. 19 editorial by the Denver Post -- "gone about their mission aggressively, with little regard for basic rights and without evidence that the people they are trying to dissuade are actually intending any criminal activity."

The editorial cites "a 21-year-old intern with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker public service group that once won the Nobel Peace Prize," who "says she and her friends were questioned even though they [had] no plans to go to New York."

And an Aug. 19 report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tells of "three men from Kirksville, Mo., [who] were so unnerved at being followed by agents and called to a grand jury here last month that they abandoned plans for peaceful protest outside the Democratic National Convention in Boston." They now refuse to have their identities disclosed.

Denise Lieberman, the American Civil Liberties Union legal director for eastern Missouri, told me that the subpoenas required the three men to appear on July 29 -- the very date they had planned to be in Boston before they decided not to go.

After they appeared before the grand jury for about five minutes, no charges were filed against them.

The FBI, says Ms. Lieberman, had asked them if they had knowledge of anyone planning "criminally disorderly conduct" at the Democratic or Republican convention, presidential debates or other places. "The fact that they did not answer the questions," Ms. Lieberman told the Post-Dispatch, "may have raised the red flag and gotten them the subpoena."