"Who Is Watching the Watchmen?" by Gene Healy (Cato Institute: Commentary)

"Who Is Watching the Watchmen?" by Gene Healy (Cato Institute: Commentary): "The DHS memo suggests that bureaucratic 'mission creep' can be as dangerous to liberty as a deliberate campaign of repression.

America's experience with domestic spying in the pre-Watergate period makes that clear. Presidents Johnson and Nixon believed antiwar groups were being funded by the Soviet Union, and pressured the CIA, the FBI, and the military to establish the link.

Federal intelligence operatives assigned to domestic spying programs like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS found little evidence of communist subversion.

Yet it's the rare bureaucracy that closes up shop for lack of anything useful to do: instead, COINTELPRO and CHAOS agents began keeping files on law-abiding citizens who disagreed with their government.

The U.S. military got into the act as well. The Army kept files on over 100,000 citizens, including such dangerous national security threats as folk singers Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez.

Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the program revealed that 'comments about the financial affairs, sex lives, and psychiatric histories of persons unaffiliated with the armed forces appear throughout the various records systems.'"