On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Ron Silliman wrote:
> Paula Friedman,
>
> Your account of your phone problems almost exactly replicates my own
> experiences a few years later. In 1974, I spent a week baby-sitting
> Stephen Weed while he and Randolph Hearst were trying to reformulate
> the money from the People In Need food program into some sort of
> program for prison movement groups (actually, what I was really trying
> to accomplish, most of all, was to keep members of the various orgs
> from killing one another in blood lust over the thought of so much
> money). At the same time, my roommate was dating the head of the East
> Bay chapter of the Sparticist League. We'd pick up the phone and hear
> old conversations we had had days earlier playing on the other end and
> that sort of thing. Also the dead lines and all the rest of it. It was
> quite spooky.
>
> I still recall Rule One from those days: when the FBI shows up at your
> door, step outside and lock it behind you (even if you don't have a
> key), so they can't just step inside and say that you "invited" them
> in.
>
> Later, when I got my FBI records (130 pages of garbage, though it
> included some stuff on a UC English Dept student who must have a
> stringer for the CIA, reporting on the politics of his fellow students
> and neighbors back in 1968), there was no mention of this activity. But
> then there wasn't even mention of one formal "on the record" interview
> I'd had with the FBI after my phone number was found in Sara Jane
> Moore's address book.
>
> My sense was that a lot of surveillance activity in the 1960s amounted
> to a weird "make work" program -- there were people interviewing
> janitors of buildings I'd lived in and teachers of courses I'd dropped
> after one or two sessions (though none of the teachers whose courses
> I'd stayed in). I think that revealing that your phone was tapped was
> their way of provoking paranoia, just to see what sort of behavior you
> would display in response. They collected tons of this data.
>
> Personally, I preferred CETA as a jobs program.
>
> Ron Silliman
>
>
>
>