The Dangers of Intelligence Agencies in a Democratic Nation: the Findings of the 1975 Church Committee

Paper prepared for presentation at the

2016 History Department Postgraduate Colloqium of the University of Reading

Reading, England, June 9, 2016

In June 1974 the Francis Ford Coppola-directed film The Conversation starring Gene Hackman was released. The two-hour long film portrayed the breakdown of surveillance expert Harry Caul, played by Hackman, who is described in the promotional tagline as ‘an invader of privacy’. Caul believed the couple he is spying on will be murdered by mysterious forces, which in turn cause Caul to question his actions. The mental collapse of Caul as he struggled with his moral compass asked the movie-goer whether what Caul was seeing was the truth or not. But the message was clear: individuals and agencies had the ability to intrude into the private lives of citizens without their knowledge.

Roll forward fifteen months to September 1975. wSydney Pollack’s film Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford and Max von Sydow hits the big screen. Redford plays Joseph Turner, an academic CIA researcher who avoids being assassinated along with his colleagues in New York. Turner goes on the run after the CIA suspects him of being a rogue agent. To add to the feeling that there is no place to hide the majority of the action takes place in broad daylight USA, mostly New York. Turner’s struggle was depicted to reflect that of the average American citizen with the hidden power of government agencies.

In addition to being to be highly praised by critics and a good watch, both of these films are indicative of the paranoia and distrust surrounding government intelligence agencies of the period, especially during the year 1975, the year of intelligence; a year described by former director of the CIA Robert Gates as ‘the worst year in CIA history.’[1] It was a year that saw a presidential commission and two congressional enquiries investigate the activities of the US intelligence agencies, with particular reference to their domestic operations. It was a year that saw some of the darkest secrets of the intelligence community laid bare to the world. And it was a year that illustrated the potential dangers of unchecked hidden power within a democratic society.

This paper will focus on the findings and revelations of one of those congressional enquiries:  the US Senate Select Committee to study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities – mercifully shortened to the Church Committee after its chairman Senator Frank Church of Idaho. In comparison to the other two enquiries, the Church Committee was the most extensive and revealing. The Rockefeller Commission named after its chair Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, was deemed to be a presidential whitewash and an attempt to retain executive control of the intelligence community. The Pike Committee, the House of Representatives equivalent of the Church Committee, was excessively aggressive and had its final report quashed by the House. In comparison to the other enquiries the Church Committee was objective, thorough and put its findings in a final report measuring two volumes and five books. This paper, based on my research to date, will use the published Church Committee’s findings to illustrate the opportunities that were grasped by both the executive branch and the intelligence agencies to abuse their power during the Cold War. Furthermore, it will assist in understanding that such dangers are not restricted to a Cold War environment, but still exist and threaten the democratic principles of the United States and beyond today. Initially this paper will deal with the ‘why’ – why did the Church Committee come into existence? – Before the ‘what’ – what did it find in its investigation? What did it mean? What does it say to us today in the twenty first century?

The Church Committee was formed because of a combination of long term and immediate factors. The Watergate enquiries that had concluded the previous year had seen the distrust between Congress and the executive branch come to a head. The struggle for superiority between the two branches of government had not dispersed since President Richard Nixon’s resignation the previous year; furthermore Nixon’s pardon by his successor Gerald Ford had done nothing but exacerbate the situation.

New York Times, Dec 22, 1974

When Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s article adorned the front page of the New York Times on December 22^nd 1974 the White House moved quickly. The article claimed that the CIA had maintained surveillance on American anti-War protestors, an act that went against its 1947 founding charter. Ford ordered CIA Director William Colby to confirm or deny the allegations. To Ford’s horror Colby responded by presenting Ford with a 700 page document known as the ‘Family Jewels’ which detailed all of the legally-suspect activities the CIA had participated in its twenty seven year lifetime. Alarmed, Ford ordered a commission under the leadership of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the claims of the Hersh article. The Commission’s objective was to not only ‘ascertain and evaluate any facts relating to activities conducted within the United States’[2]  but also to stop Congress from seizing the initiative in the enquiry and ‘to preserve the CIA.’[3] While the Commission found that the CIA had ‘engaged in some activities that should be criticized and not be allowed to happen again’ it failed utterly in deterring Congress.[4]

The Church Committee was voted into existence on 27^th January 1975, a month after the Hersh article. Calls for an investigation were urged ‘to cleanse whatever abuses there have been in the past.’[5] Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield stated that the select committee would be neither a ‘witch hunt nor whitewash’ and that ‘there will be no wholesale dismantling of our intelligence community.’[6] Where the Rockefeller Commission was restricted to just domestic CIA operations the Church Committee’s remit was wider, encompassing all intelligence agency activities since the Second World War. The investigations built on the work of the Rockefeller Commission and unearthed a number of operations that had been unconstitutional and illegal, and intruded on the private lives of its citizens. It judged such operations as ‘degrading a free society.’[7] While the Rockefeller Commission focussed solely on the accusations Hersh had made in his New York Times article, the Church Committee identified that US citizens’ civil liberties had been encroached upon by the CIA, the FBI and NSA in the quest to secure national security.

The CIA operation that had been illustrated in Hersh’s article was Operation CHAOS. This operation was an attempt by the CIA to connect the dissident anti-War movement to foreign organisations. It had been ordered to do by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. Johnson was unable to understand that the anti-Vietnam war protestors were executing the most basic of American rights – the right to protest against the government. Instead Johnson suspected communist influence from overseas and ordered the FBI to investigate as early as 1965. When the Bureau failed to find such a connection Johnson turned to the CIA. While this was not strictly illegal, the Agency’s retention of files on the US citizens it had placed under surveillance was in opposition to its statutory regulations. According to the 1947 National Security Act the Agency was to have ‘no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions.’[8] Yet the Agency’s investigations into the anti-War movement were just that.

As well as its domestic activities the Committee was highly critical of the Agency’s involvement in assassination plots of various foreign leaders. While the Committee found that the Agency had not actually assassinated anyone it had been supportive of plots to assassinate or overthrow leaders such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The Committee stated that such plots violated ‘moral precepts fundamental to our way of life.’[9] Such was the clamour of the public to learn about these plots that the Committee was forced to publish an interim report solely on the matter.

The FBI’s activities were even more nefarious. Under the directorship of J Edgar Hoover the Bureau mounted a campaign between 1956 and 1972 against various protest and political groups. This came under the banner of what the Bureau termed COINTELPRO – a portmanteau of Counter Intelligence Program. The illegal surveillance and at times politically motivated programs were aimed at a wide range of targets. The COINTELPROs were deliberately ambiguously named to enable the Bureau to encompass individuals and organisations under each program. Target groups that were labelled by the Bureau as The New Left included Students for a Democratic Society and other student and anti-Vietnam War groups; the Black Panther Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were included in the program COINTELPRO Black Hate/Black Nationalism. Anyone that publicly opposed government policy became targets of the various COINTELPRO programs: White Hate, Puerto Rican Independence Party, Socialist Workers Party, and the Communist Party of the United States. It’s important to note that none of the groups or individuals targeted by COINTELPRO was ever investigated with prosecution in mind. In the FBI’s own words the information was intentionally gathered ‘to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise.’^[10]

The information gathered from COINTELPRO was often used to the political advantage of the four presidential administrations of its lifetime. It was information harnessed through illegal wiretaps, warrantless surveillance, and through a Bureau operating beyond its remit. The Kennedy brothers only publicly pledged their support for the civil rights movement after finding that Martin Luther King had no communist affiliation. This reassurance was gained after using information gathered from warrantless-wire taps authorised by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson – Kennedy’s successor – paranoid and fearing a coup in favour of arch rival Bobby Kennedy, used the FBI to perform illegal surveillance on rival candidates at the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City; firstly so that he could identify his rivals, and secondly to ensure that he would win the nomination.

The National Security Agency (NSA) at the time was considered so secret that its existence was only rumoured about. During the Church Committee’s investigations its acronymic title was jokingly referred to by investigators as the No Such Agency despite being founded in 1952. Two of the Agency’s programs were of concern to the Church Committee – Project Minaret and Project Shamrock. These two projects were programs that intercepted electronic and telegraphic communication between the United States and overseas. Project Shamrock ran from 1956 to 1975 while Project Minaret ran between 1967 and 1973. Shamrock enabled the Agency to copy every telegram between the US and overseas with the collusion of three communications companies who had been assured that their efforts were helping to maintain national security. The NSA had no such charter or guidelines such as the FBI and NSA and so was not restricted in its activities involving domestic intelligence gathering. According to the testimony of NSA Director General Lew Allen to the Church Committee, those Americans whose communications were intercepted were part of a watch list. This watch list consisted of individuals suspected of criminal activity by various law enforcement agencies such as the FBI or the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The Committee’s concerns were not with the data collected but with the process that the NSA had undertaken. At no point did the NSA seek or was given a warrant for the interceptions involving US citizens, which was a breach of their constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment. At the time of the Church Committee the history of the Fourth Amendment was described as ‘the history of the American revolution and this nation’s quest for independence.’[11] Senator Church warned that the Agency’s technological ability meant that it ‘could be turned inward against our own people’ with little restriction.[12] The prescience of the Church Committee was uncanny: skip forward thirty eight years to 2013 and the revelations of former CIA and NSA employee Edward Snowden mirror that of the Church Committee. In place of the Project Shamrock there is the NSA’s PRISM, part of a global surveillance scheme. The Congress-approved PRISM program originated in the presidency of George W Bush and continues to this day. The NSA is authorized to access the electronic communications of US citizens for up seven days without the necessity of a warrant or referral to the courts. Barack Obama defended the program when it was revealed to the world through the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers. The President erroneously described PRISM as a ‘circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people. And all of it is done under the oversight of the courts.’ And, like his predecessors, described the surveillance undertaken solely ‘for legitimate national security purposes.’[13] As Chancellor Merkel discovered when it was revealed the NSA had collected data from her telephone calls, there are no such restrictions on the NSA acquiring intelligence on overseas targets.

The Church Committee believed that the dangers that accompanied the operation of intelligence agencies in a democratic society could be overcome. The danger is not the intelligence agencies themselves but the secrecy that surrounds them. In the words of one US Senator in 1975 ‘the very nature of these intelligence agencies is in direct contradiction to the concept of a free society.’[14] The Church Committee felt that the solution to the problems lay in robust congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Prior to the Committee’s investigations the intelligence community had been answerable to four different committees although rarely and usually with little enthusiasm. Congress had taken the opinion that the intelligence community was run by honourable men, and as far as Congress was concerned the less they knew the better. In the words of one politician ‘Congress didn’t know, nor did it want to know.’[15] But such a lack of vigilance had led to the abuse of the constitutional rights of US citizens by the US intelligence community, sometimes at the direction of the White House. Such an abuse was possible ‘primarily because the checks and balances of designed by the Framers of the Constitution to ensure accountability had not been applied.’[16]

In its summary the Church Committee recommended that the Senate create a Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) to ensure that such opportunities never arose again. However, despite the SSCI being established in 1976, the Snowden revelations are evidence that the oversight has neither been robust nor effective. In addition to the Snowden revelations it emerged that the CIA, ‘encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could’ in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, adopted ‘a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of US law.’[17] Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the SSCI 2009 to 2015, stated that such activities were evidence that the United States and the SSCI had allowed ‘grievous past mistakes to be repeated.’[18] Once again, Congress didn’t know, nor did it want to know.

Just like the 1970s film-makers, concerns of the intelligence community in the modern era are evident in twenty-first century movies. CIA torture in so-called black sites was depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 feature film Zero Dark Thirty. The film which depicted the CIA’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden neither justifies nor condemns the torture apart from – strangely – its effect on the CIA agents. In addition this year’s release from erstwhile conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone entitled Snowden is sure to cast a critical eye on the US government’s treatment of the intelligence community whistleblower.

What is evident is the failure of Congress and the nation to learn from the Church Committee’s findings. The US media has given more airtime and paper space to the pseudo-celebrity status of Edward Snowden than to the crimes he has publicised. The press, Congress and the people all agree that there is a necessity for an intelligence service, but what needs to be established and vigorously enforced are the parameters in which they can operate within a democratic state. This requires the watchfulness of Congress and a vigilant citizenry willing to question its government. Failure to do could result in the liberties of the nation being encroached upon yet again, if they have not been already.

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[1] Robert M Gates, From the Shadows, (New York: 1996) p60

[2] Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, Report to the President, (Washington: 1975), p271 [Afterwards cited as the Rockefeller Report]

[3] Memorandum of Conversation: Allegations of CIA Domestic Activities, , January 3^rd, 1975, Gerald Ford Library.

[4] Rockefeller Report p10

[5] Senator John Pastore, Congressional Record, January 21, 1975, p840

[6] Congressional Record, January 21^st 1975, p843

[7]  United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report together with additional, supplemental, and separate views, (S.Rpt. 94-755) [Hereafter referred to as Church Report] ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’ (Washington: April 26, 1976) p10

[8] 1947 National Security Act, Sec 102, (d), (3)

[9] United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Interim Report, (S.Rpt. 94-465) [Hereafter referred to as Church Interim Report] ‘Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign leaders’ (Washington: November 20, 1975) p257

[10] J Edgar Hoover, Memorandum to all FBI field offices, August 25, 1967 found in United States Senate, The Church Report, ‘Volume 6: The FBI’, p383

[11] Attorney General  Edward H Levi testimony to the Church Committee, November 6, 1975, Church Report, ‘Volume 5: The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights’, p71

[12] Church Report, ‘Volume 5: The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights’, p3

[13] Barack Obama: “The President’s News Conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Berlin, Germany,” June 19, 2013.

[14] Senator Lowell P Weicker, Congressional Record, June 11, 1975, p18282

[15] Rep Michael Harrington quoted in Mary Russell, ‘New House Panel on CIA is Sought’, Washington Post, January 8, 1975, p2

[16] Church Report, ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’ p289

[17] Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program [Declassified Version], (Washington, 2014),p2

[18] Ibid. p4

 

Forgetting the lessons of the Church Committee

Paper prepared for presentation at the

2016 Annual Conference of the

American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association (UK)

Reading, England, January 7-9, 2016

For the entire duration of his presidency, Barack Obama has both approved and absolved the abuse of the civil liberties of United States’ citizens. The Obama administration has directed and participated in global surveillance programs that are often unconstitutional in both their nature and methods. Although not necessarily illegal, the majority are most certainly unconstitutional. In the ongoing global war on terror the federal government acquires, stores and analyses a greater amount of data on its citizens each day. The US intelligence community, under presidential direction, collates electronic metadata such as telephone calls, emails, and instant message details. In doing so it often infringes of the Fourth Amendment rights of its targets. Whistleblowers from within the intelligence agency have been arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for raising such issues. Worryingly for civil libertarian groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) these surveillance programs continue to this day. Initiatives such as the National Security Agency’s (NSA) clandestine PRISM program are justified to the US general public because of the apparent threat to the nation’s security.

However this paper will suggest that the Obama administration is not extraordinary in its actions. Furthermore Obama is merely one of many presidents – if not all – who have ridden roughshod over their citizens’ constitutional rights in the name of national security. Using the research I have conducted into the revelations of the 1975 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities – mercifully shortened to the Church Committee after its chairman Senator Frank Church of Idaho – this paper will show that presidents have willingly traded the civil liberties of American citizens for national security.

When the final report of the Church Committee was published on 26^th April 1976, it concluded an investigation that had started some fifteen months earlier. It had been caused in part by a front-page headline by journalist Seymour Hersh in the New York Times on December 22^nd 1974. Hersh’s article exposed the CIA’s ‘Family Jewels’, a series of in-house reports on the agency’s illegal actions from 1959 to 1973 with extensive coverage of the agency’s surveillance of the various US protest groups of the 1960s.

In an attempt to outmanoeuvre any attempted congressional enquiry President Gerald Ford announced that there would be a presidential commission under the chairmanship of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Commission as it became known was limited to ‘activities conducted within the United States by the Central Intelligence Agency.’^[1] Despite the Commission stating that the CIA had ‘engaged in some activities that should be criticized and not be allowed to happen again’, it found that ‘the great majority of the CIA’s domestic activities comply with its statutory authority.’^[2]

In response to the White House’s attempt to stifle any enquiry, Senate Resolution 21 was passed on 27^th January 1975. The resolution called for an eleven-man select committee to ‘conduct an investigation of Government intelligence activities, including the extent to which any illegal or improper activities were engaged in.’^[3] The Committee’s members other than Frank Church included future and past political heavyweights: Walter Mondale, Barry Goldwater, Gary Hart, Howard Baker, and Vice Chairman John Tower. In an immediate post-Watergate era, this was an attempt by Congress to check the prerogative of the Executive Branch and to establish a governmental process that was transparent and answerable to Congress.

The Church Committee’s investigations revealed a plethora of civil liberty abuses by the intelligence community. Despite Frank Church’s suggestion that the CIA had operated like a ‘rogue elephant’, successive occupants of the White House were shown to have instigated the majority of the abuses committed by the CIA, FBI and NSA. Such abuses were not always confined to concerns of national security. The Committee’s findings highlighted the ease with which presidents could use the intelligence communities to investigate critics of their administration for political gain.

The most frequent infringements on civil liberties were the presidential requests for the FBI to name check individuals. The FBI was asked to perform such duties as early as 1940 when Roosevelt requested that senders of telegrams criticising his policies to be name checked. Information from the FBI’s files would then be used by the various Presidents to either discredit opponents or to keep them in line. This continued throughout the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. However, according to the Committee’s final report, ‘the political misuse of the FBI under the Johnson and Nixon administrations seems to have been more extensive than in previous years.’^[4] It is during these years that the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Programs – or COINTELPRO – became more frequent, personal, and reprehensible. The programs targeted any group that protested or urged political, social, or economic reform.

The COINTELPROs frequently included wiretapping and surveillance of individuals justified by the federal government as threats to national security. These often-illegal operations started in 1956 under Dwight Eisenhower and continued until 1972. The illegal surveillance and at times politically motivated programs were aimed at diverse targets. The COINTELPROs were deliberately ambiguously named to allow a wider net than necessary to be thrown. Target groups were labelled by the Bureau such as The New Left, which allowed Students for a Democratic Society and other anti-Vietnam War groups to be targeted; COINTELPRO aimed at Black Hate or Black Nationalist groups allowed organisations such as the Black Panther Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to be included in the program. Those that protested against government policy were identified as threats to the national security, with little cause for vindication. Critically, at no point were those surveilled considered for prosecution. In the FBI’s own words, the information was intentionally gathered to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise.’^[5]

The FBI’s series of COINTELPROs ran for 16 years spanning the administrations of four different presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. All were aware of the operations and used them at times for their own political advantage. The Kennedys ensured that Martin Luther King had no communist connections before publicly pledging their support for the civil rights movement. This reassurance was gained after using information gathered from warrantless wire-taps authorised by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson, fearing a coup organised by ‘Bobby-lovers’ within his own administration, illegally used the FBI to perform surveillance on rival candidates at the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. This was done so that firstly so he could identify his rivals, and secondly to ensure that he would win the nomination.

The abuse of the rights of citizens in the name of national security during this period of the Cold War was not limited to the activities of the FBI. The CIA had been established in 1947 solely to undertake foreign intelligence missions. Fear of creating an American version of the Gestapo ensured that the agency was statutorily restricted from performing police duties within the United States. Despite such legislation the Church Committee revealed that the Agency had been instructed to collect information on protest groups by President Johnson in 1967 as part of Operation CHAOS.Those targeted by Operation CHAOS were individuals that protested against the federal government’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Johnson was certain of foreign involvement in the organisation of the protests and asked the CIA to investigate. Johnson’s inability to empathise with the protesters led to CIA field offices abroad requiring ‘much more than background information’ which ‘resulted in broad coverage and collection.’^[6] Despite being informed that such investigations were unconstitutional the White House continued to ask the CIA for more information on protesters in the vain hope that a link to a foreign power would be established.

The Church Committee’s criticism was also aimed at the NSA, an organisation that was not officially acknowledged before the Church Committee. The Committee had great difficulty in finding evidence of any of the agency’s activities. The No Such Agency as it became dubbed by committee investigators had been established in 1952, and had run Project Shamrock for over twenty years until the program was cancelled in 1975. In essence Shamrock was a program that enabled the NSA to copy every single telegram that was sent to and received from overseas. It was done with the collusion of three communications companies who had been assured that their efforts were helping to maintain national security. Ironically Shamrock was cancelled not because of the Committee’s investigations; after twenty three years of illegally copying and collating citizens telegrams, the agency considered it ineffective.

Parallels can be drawn between the abuses during the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. In place of the NSA’s communication interception under Project Shamrock there is the NSA’s recent PRISM program. Although it originated under Obama’s predecessor George W Bush PRISM continues to collate information on US citizens today. The Congress-approved PRISM program authorizes the various US intelligence agencies to access the electronic communications of US citizens for up seven days without the necessity of a warrant. Obama erroneously described PRISM as a ‘circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people. And all of it is done under the oversight of the courts.’ And, like his predecessors, described the surveillance undertaken solely ‘for legitimate national security purposes.’^[7]

The Church Committee identified the failure of applying the founders of the Constitution’s checks and balances system as the reason for these abuses. The inability of Congress to ensure accountability of the intelligence services ‘undermined the constitutional rights of citizens.’^[8] The 2014 CIA Torture Report suggests that such a failure in congressional oversight is again a cause for alarm. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence censured the CIA for torture that provided little intelligence. However it stated that the CIA was ‘encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.’^[9]

Prophetically the Church Committee warned of the concerns of a ‘drift toward “big brother government”’ with technological advances.^[10] Edward Snowden’s revelations of 2013 of the numerous programs undertaken by the intelligence community suggest that such a drift is a fait accompli. While the memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks remains in the psyche of American culture this drift towards total surveillance will continue. As such presidents will always put security first before civil liberties for fear of allowing the next terrorist attack.

While the federal government’s current abuses of US citizens’ civil liberties should be castigated, Obama should not be singled out for vilification. Although operating under presidential direction the US intelligence community is just as much a guilty party in the events uncovered by the leaks of former NSA employee Edward Snowden. As is Congress’s failure to perform adequate oversight of the intelligence services. There has been a critical failure of the checks and balances system put in place initially by the Founders, but also as suggested by the Church Committee in its final report. Future research will be aimed at the public’s opinion towards the Executive branch’s overreach in the name of national security. Above all, what is concerning the most is the general antipathy shown by the American public towards such abuses of their constitutional rights. Compared with the furore over the Federal government’s interference with their Second Amendment rights, the US public has shown little appetite to defend their Fourth Amendment rights.

My future research will be focuses on why there was outrage in 1975, but not in 2013. Initial theories combine both the effect of 9/11 and the increase in social media over the fifteen years. Does the fear of a terrorist attack – real or otherwise – overrule the rights Constitution? Billions of people advertise on the Internet their location, their personal details, and what they are doing on a daily – sometimes hourly – basis. Is the government’s collection and storage of such details now accepted as a by-product of national security?

Nonetheless the intelligence community will continue their surveillance programs under the next president. And as technology advances so will the intelligence community’s ability to collect bulk data, legally or otherwise. However hope is possibly at hand with Obama’s signing of the USA Freedom Act in June of last year and the recent amendment to the USA Patriot Act. The NSA’s ability to collect bulk data was curtailed although it can still collect bulky data. The digital civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a ‘step in the right direction.’ Nonetheless the EFF warned of the potential misuse of Executive Order 12333 which, ironically, is designed to ‘protect Americans from Presidentially-directed spying.’^[11] The Church Committee emphatically stated that a balance between national security and the maintenance of civil liberties was possible. It is down to the self-control of the intelligence community, the management of the Executive Branch, and the watchfulness of Congress to ensure that this is achieved. And only by doing so can citizens of the United States move towards living in what the Church Committee termed ‘a free and decent society.’^[12]

^[1] Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, Report to the President, (Washington: 1975), p271 [Afterwards cited as the Rockefeller Report]

^[2] Rockefeller Report p115

^[3] S. Res 92 (94^th): ‘to establish a select committee of the Senate to conduct an investigation and study of governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities’, January 27^th, 1975

^[4] United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report together with additional, supplemental, and separate views, (S.Rpt. 94-755)[Hereafter referred to as Church Report] ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’ (Washington, 1976) P227

^[5] J Edgar Hoover, Memorandum to all FBI field offices, August 25, 1967 found in United States Senate, The Church Report ‘Volume 6: The FBI’, P383

^[6] The Church Report, ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’, P101

^[7] Barack Obama: “The President’s News Conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Berlin, Germany,” June 19, 2013.

^[8] The Church Report ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’, P289

^[9] Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and

Interrogation Program [Declassified Version], (Washington, 2014),P2

^[10] The Church Report ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’, P289

^[11] David Greene and Nadia Kayyali ,‘Bulk Call Details Records Collection Ends: What It Means’, 30^th November, 2015 found at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/bulk-call-details-records-collection-ends-what-means [accessed 8th December 2015]

^[12] The Church Report ‘Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans’, P290