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.