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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 8, 2013)
street roots Nov. 8,2013 WATCHERS, from page 8 K.S.: We are getting a sense of things being wildly off. For instance, there is a whole file on a group that may be a fabrication or a fiction that it even existed, Maybe these were people who just got together in various ways. And what that teaches me is that people are relying on files like this to put forward narratives. So it’s important to get in there and complicate the narratives. G.I.: When it came to Lloyd Marbet, what happened in a police surveillance report, they drew up a kind of narrative of the ingredients for a Molotov cocktail. But when you hear Lloyd talk about it, it’s the furthest thing from his mind. He was basically a complete pacifist and didn’t believe in that kind of violent action. He even had a hard time justifying civil disobedience as a last resort. For him, it took a lot of imagination to think that way because he’s looking at it thinking, I have this old dog, which was a mutt, and it’s described as a German Shepard. And I had this old truck that would break down, and I was spending time up in the mountains, so I would have to have a gas can because I would run out of gas, and it was constantly breaking down so I had oily rags in the back. K.S.: That file was from 1972 surveillance of his attendance of the hearing on the Trojan nuclear plant. I was thinking, too, with these files, you see some informant transcripts, and those have an inflamed rhetoric, which I can imagine how that can affect how a group is perceived. And informants can have various motives for making something sound really lively and interesting. J. T.: Did you ju st sift through the files and fin d what was interesting or did you have a couple organizations in mind? What was the most interesting? K. S.: I think we’ve both looked at bigger collections early on like the American Indian Movement or the Black Panther Party and surveillance on anti-nuclear activism. One of the threads that’s been interesting for me is what have activists been able to prevent from happening or were able to make happen. So with the anti nuke activists, there were a lot of plans for nuclear plants in the area, but the construction of almost all of those, except for Trojan, were prevented. And Trojan was shut down from the relentless activism. J. T.: D uring this time, the police were watching some fairly innocuous groups. Why were they so worried about these groups and have these preoccupations? Did this give you any insights into the thinking or mindset o f the people doing this surveillance? P H O T O BY M A R Y H A N S E N Kaia Sand and Garrick Im atani sit with a sm all portion o f archives that comprise the Watcher Files, now on display through November at the City o f Portland Archives and Records Center. focused on this one set of documents to motivation is to protect the power of the think about as possibly isolated events, but status quo, and threats to that power were we know from previous work that this is a reasons for surveillance. So women history that predates these files, and even organizing were a perceived threat. after the law changed in 1981 and the law Organizing around domestic violence in the made it illegal to do this kind of late 1970s changed rape law so that (surveillance) work, there are new task husbands could be prosecuted for rape, and forces and new ways that’s one of the of monitoring and things that enters the collecting information fuzz with media "W hat have activists been on public groups. clippings. That was a able to prevent from You’d have to go back way that people were a little bit further if happening or were able to organizing to make a change. m a te happen? W ith the anti- you wanted to look at a larger systemic way Challenges to the nafee activists, there were a of thinking. norms and laws of the It seemed to be an day were perceived as lo t of plans lo r unclear enormous task to threatening. That plants In the area, but the even address these becomes something construction of almost a ll of files. There are over that I find really those, except for Trojan, 300 organizations compelling about the here, so we’re just were prevented« And Trojan subject and how we scratching the could continue to was shat down from the surface. We could be apply it. We know that relentless activism /" working on this not all laws are just ” KA,A SAND project for 10 years. and if surveillance is used in a way to J.T.: Thinking prevent any about what’s in the news today about challenges to produce a more just society government spying, have you had any insights that is something we should be alarmed into it and how much things have stayed the about. same even though they’ve changed? K. S.: Well, I think working with these files makes it really clear that one G.I.: If you think about this in a larger history, it’s easy for us because we’ve been K.S.: I guess one of the things I think about is how we have security goals on one hand: to prevent something bad from happening to people, like violent crimes etc. But an unfortunate aspect of that surveillance is that it’s often used to suppress dissent, and you can’t really separate all that out too easily. I do know just from reading what Sen. Ron Wyden said that it doesn’t seem like a lot of the surveillance has led to any prevention from anything happening, so it makes me skeptical of how this surveillance is being used. I feel like these files offer me a little microcosm because they are a little more containable and they do reveal for me how much the people who were gathering these files let their own biases into who they were surveying, and it was very politically charged, the choices that they were making. G.I.: I think the correlations of what you want to draw from the relationship between these past events and current events are there. I think that one thing that’s been really interesting, too, is how different the times are and what sort of scale and magnitude that certain surveillance activities have taken on now. You know, everything that’s going on with the National Security Administration is so timely, but any time you do a project on surveillance it’s usually pretty relevant.
