Every time one of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests I file with the FBI subsequently nets a result indicating potential or actual surveillance or other kinds of actions targeting an American domestic civil society organization, it obligates me to notify the affected group to see how they want to proceed. A few groups have, in the past, asked Cato not to go public with our findings; most others have been willing to let us do so.

And then there’s Concerned Women of America (CWA), which has responded in exactly the way every group should when they discover they’ve been in the FBI’s crosshairs.

In the Washington Times commenting on Cato’s FOIA findings, CWA CEO Penny Nance said this

“You want to believe that the people of your intelligence agencies and at the top of the FBI are credible, and you want to believe that they are only looking at Americans with probable cause, but I’ve learned that’s not necessarily the case. That’s what this has taught me,” Ms. Nance said. “What this has taught me is that the FBI does not need probable cause to snoop on Americans, and that is a wake-up call.”

As the Times piece also noted, Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R‑IA) has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray to explain just exactly why the FBI was, without any criminal predicate whatsoever, allowing one or more FBI agents to open an “Assessment” on CWA and troll public and government databases looking for evidence of corruption on the part of Nance’s organization. 

That’s a welcome step, but it’s important to keep sight of the larger picture. 

What the FBI did to CWA it could to do any domestic civil society organization.

Indeed, Cato has other examples of that to point to already, including FBI actively spying on a government watchdog group and monitoring LNG pipeline project protesters, among others. It doesn’t take long for these anecdotes to become real data. Not surprisingly, the FBI is doing its best to keep the public from seeing that data, which is why, as the Times reported, Cato is suing the FBI for copies of Assessments going back to 2009 (when the FBI was first authorized to use them). 

In late October 2021, this country will have been living with the PATRIOT Act for 20 years, and for 13 years with the FBI’s radical investigative tool known as Assessments. It’s well past time for Congress to open the books on these and every other surveillance program implemented since the Church Committee era over 45 years ago. Failure to do so will make it more likely that the creeping authoritarianism of the surveillance state becomes inexorable…and possibly irreversible.