For years, our parents have told us that “the phones are listening to us.” You mention needing new shoes and hours later, you get Nike or Adidas ads on Facebook. While it seems like a fear-driven conspiracy theory, the idea that the government is watching our every move is actually closer to the truth than they want you to believe. 

Let’s go back to 1956 in Washington D.C.. America had wrapped up with World War II just over ten years prior and post-war tensions with the Soviet Union were already heating up. North Korea, North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union were global powers who had embraced communism in their government and America needed to stop the spread of the philosophies into the Western hemisphere. The main goal of the United States government was simple: stop Communism, maintain Capitalism. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched something called COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was an abbreviation for “counterintelligence program” and it was a series of covert, and often illegal, operations aimed at surveilling and controlling the American people. The first program was supposed to target the aforementioned Communist Party of the USA. 

In the later 1960’s, a new COINTELPRO branch was established with the purpose of shutting down groups fighting for Puerto Rican independence. Puerto Rico was, and still is, an American territory and the government views their independence groups as radical and anti-American, claiming that it posed a threat to national security if they were independent. What many at the time failed to see was that Puerto Rico is just down the water from Cuba, which was established as Communist by 1965. The U.S. likely feared a Communist takeover in Central America, urging them to assign a COINTELPRO plan to Puerto Rico. 

From 1961 to 1971, there were COINTELPRO subdivisions targeting the Socialist Worker’s Party, white hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, black nationalist hate movements, and the New Left. The “black nationalist hate movements” included many civil rights groups and organizations like the Black Panther Party, which was an organization that spoke out against police brutality. COINTELPRO’s targeting of civil rights activists has led some theorists to argue that the FBI was responsible for the assassination Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. The New Left included groups against the Vietnam War, feminist groups, and student organizations during the student protest period of the late 1960’s. 

The tactics that COINTELPRO used were largely unethical and even illegal, yet they were still passed and approved by the FBI headquarters at Washington D.C. They were implemented to dissolve and disband any movement they feared would undermine federal authority. They published falsified documents and statements, faked letters and communications, and they used anonymous letters and phone calls to silence and fear-monger the targeted groups and individuals. If you were targeted by COINTELPRO, you were subject to break-ins, false arrests, and forcible unemployment. 

COINTELPRO was exposed in 1971, when classified federal documents were stolen from an FBI field office in PA and released through public media. The FBI discontinued the program soon after the exposé and, in 1974, apologized for their actions against the American people. 

COINTELPRO is only a piece of the global surveillance phenomenon. From MK Ultra to Facetune, we are constantly being surveilled and are always the subjects of covert psyops being run by governments all over the world and we don’t even know it. Are we all building and working for the same machine?