The Characteristics Of The FBI As A Secret Police Force

Surveillance has commonly been associated with authoritarian states, not democratic states. As such, government intelligence and security agencies in democratic states, like the FBI, receive less scrutiny than their authoritarian counterparts, like the KGB or Stasi. Thus, to better ascertain the nature of American policing, it is important to determine the extent to which the FBI may be considered a secret police force. As defining the characteristics of a secret police force can be a topic of discussion unto itself, this analysis will not focus on identifying the precise features of secret police organizations. To highlight how the FBI may be considered a secret police force, it will compare the FBI to the KGB, an organization commonly considered

During World War I, the FBI made it a goal of the department to persecute disloyalty to the United States, particularly disloyalty from German Americans. As a part of this campaign, Bureau “detectives frequently opted to meet with an alleged dissenter and to caution him or her to avoid criticizing the war.” Due to a lack of resources, the Bureau was unable to prosecute every dissenter, instead opting for informal warnings urging people to avoid disloyalty.2 From early in the twentieth century, the FBI regulated society for a political purpose, which was encouraging support for American involvement in World War I. During the same period, Soviet surveillance officers read almost all correspondence passing through the mail to have “all-encompassing (one is tempted to say total) information on ‘political moods.’” Although the KGB did not exist during the Russian Civil War, the political nature of Soviet surveillance remained well into the twentieth, influencing KGB surveillance. As discussed previously, the FBI would meet with dissenters and caution them to avoid disloyalty instead of opting for legal action. The KGB was similar through its use of profilaktika, public or private discussions with dissenters cautioning them of being against the regime. Thus, through their political motives and

In their collection of information, the KGB would recruit secret informers that would work directly with the agency. While the FBI used informants to collect information on African American communities, they also collaborated with private organizations to collect information. According to historian Alfred McCoy, this collaboration between the U.S. government and private organizations was a part of a larger tendency in U.S. intelligence gathering. In fact, this tendency is indicative of how U.S. surveillance was not as legally sanctioned as KGB surveillance. While the practices of the KGB previously described were sanctioned by the Stalin regime or the Khrushchev regime, the FBI combatted communist organizations with illegal surveillance practices, not subject to Congressional scrutiny. Both the FBI and KGB surveilled substantial portions of the populations, but the FBI tended to focus on specific populations, unlike the KGB. As mentioned before, the FBI surveilled specific populations, like German Americans during World War I or African Americans during the civil rights movement. However, the KGB intended to surveil all citizens using a culture of terror, not just groups considered politically