Clips of this appearance have been making the rounds in relation to revelations from the Twitter Files on the control/collusion of government agencies in suppressing free speech and controlling narratives at Twitter, and undoubtedly all other major platforms.
Who was Senator Church, and what was his committee looking into back in 1975? And how relevant is it today?
Senator Frank Church1:
Let me tell you this: in the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States Government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air.
These messages are between ships at sea, they can be between, units, military units in the field. We have a very extensive capability of intercepting messages wherever they may be in the airwaves. Now that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know.
At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left - such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide if this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country.
The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
Now, why is this investigation important? I’ll tell you why: because I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That’s the abyss from which there is no return.
I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America.
In 1975 Church chaired the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a 16-month investigation of national intelligence agencies.2
Church Committee, Wikipedia3:
The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the:
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
National Security Agency (NSA),
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the
Internal Revenue Service (IRS).Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church (D-ID), the committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the "Year of Intelligence", including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee's efforts led to the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The most shocking revelations of the committee include:
Operation MKULTRA involving the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control;[1][2]
COINTELPRO involving the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations;[3]
Family Jewels, a CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders;[4][5][6][7]
Operation Mockingbird as a systematic propaganda campaign with domestic and foreign journalists operating as CIA assets and dozens of US news organizations providing cover for CIA activity.[8]
It also unearthed Project SHAMROCK in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA (while officially confirming the existence of this signals intelligence agency to the public for the first time).
Pretty, pretty relevant.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wtf
