Lucille Ball, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon, Jack London, Hugo Black, Berthold Brecht, Cezar Chavez, animal mutilations, the Quaker's "notorious" pacifist American Friends' Service Committee, Clarence Darrow... they're all there in the now-opened FBI surveillance files. Right in alphabetical order with Al Capone, Sam Giancana and Klaus Barbie and many, many more in the FBI's documents now online, opened under the Freedom of Information Act mandates. See:
<http://foia.fbi.gov/alpha.htm>
Our tax dollars (and E. Edgar's zeal to peep) at work. And now ... we too, can snoop.
--jim, Jim Warren; jwarren@well.com Contributing Editor & technology public-policy columnist, MicroTimes Magazine Also GovAccess list-owner/editor
AND
From: Jim Warren <jwarren@WELL.COM>
Subject: Re: "For a [not so] good time, call" ... the FBI
FOIA-online <sigh>
To: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>, Matthew Gaylor
<freematt@coil.com>,FOI-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
The plot thickens. Last night, under the subject-line caption abov, I sent out a pointer to the FBI's online disclosures of often-requested files re past FBI investigations -- at <http://foia.fbi.gov/alpha.htm> -- which I had accessed without difficulty.
However, this morning I received messages from two readers.
One (appearing to be in the USA, but on AOL ;-) said, in part:
>... I connected and the minute I
>tried to look at anything, I got a "Disconnected by peer message".
The other, from someone in Croatia, said, in part:
>Seems it works for US citizens only...
>
>I have got a message:
>
>"You are not authorized
>to view this page"
>
>And so all the same for any file
>I wanted to see.
Well ... so much for "freedom" of information.
--jim, Jim Warren; jwarren@well.com Contributing Editor & technology public-policy columnist, MicroTimes Magazine Also GovAccess list-owner/editor