Louis Stokes Quotes

You are becoming a left wing McCarthyite …. The FBI has better things to do than to listen to our conversations.

In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after hearings exposed the F.B.I.'s egregious practice of illegally spying on civil rights leaders, black nationalists, Communists and Vietnam War protesters.

I would like you to consider the difference in the time from 1963 to date. The FBI, at that time, was headed by Mr. Hoover who had been appointed Director continuously. He had, I would say, a good reputation.

The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable.

Hoover had us [FBI agents and officials] prepare material for McCarthy regularly. We kept furnishing it to him while Hoover publicly denied that we were helping him.

It would be encouraging to us if Mr. Hoover and the FBI would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for bombing churches and killing little children as they are in seeking out alleged Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement

The intelligence agencies sometimes abuse people. The FBI abused Martin Luther King.

An interesting parallel: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character. I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama.

I believe that the FBI clearly was concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm X wherever possible.

I'm not against the FBI investigation in doing a proper role, but I'm against the FBI spying on people like Martin Luther King. I'm against the CIA fighting secret wars and overthrowing government.

On his own okay, Bush has authorized eavesdropping on as many as a thousand people over the past three years, with some of those intercepts being purely domestic, the New York Times reported.

The FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program would work hand-in-hand with police departments, literally planning attacks on Black Panther Party offices throughout the United States of America. They did this over a period of time.

I wonder if 50 years from now we'll look back, and maybe Julian Assange will be the hero and J. Edgar Hoover will be the enemy of the state.

Trade shows such as the wire tappers' ball are highly secretive and ban journalists from attending. None of the U.S. agencies that attended the wire tappers' ball - including the FBI, the Secret Service, and every branch of the military - were willing to comment when a reporter queried them about their attendance.

There is an entire generation of young people who know nothing about how viciously the FBI attacked The Black Panther Party, and why.

When the 'New York Times' revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications.

What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.

I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.

By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program was designed to prevent a Black Messiah from rising to unite the people.

We should outlaw all wiretapping—public and private, wherever and whenever it occurs, except when the security of the nation itself is at stake—and then only with the strictest safeguards.

Parading around the nation as a squeaky clean, crime-fighting G-man, J. Edgar Hoover, we now know, thoroughly abused the powers of his office and completely trampled on the individual rights of thousands of patriotic, law-abiding citizens.