Activist Jailed for His Facebook Posts Speaks Out About Secret FBI Surveillance

According to a report in The Guardian (May 11, 2018), a Texas judge has dismissed the indictment against a man believed to be the first prosecuted under a new government effort to track "black identity extremists" nearly six months after he was arrested and jailed.

This should horrify every American: the FBI held a man for 6 months and tried to prosecute him as a “Black Identity Extremist” (BIE)...because he made anti-cop postings on Facebook and attended a Black Lives Matter rally.

The BIE surveillance and failed prosecution of Rakem Balogun, first reported by Foreign Policy, have drawn comparisons to the government’s discredited efforts to monitor and disrupt activists during the civil rights movement, particularly the FBI counterintelligence program called Cointelpro, which targeted Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP and the Black Panther party.

Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, said the BIE assessment was “extraordinarily overbroad” and that the concept was spreading to law enforcement agencies across the US as more black activists were facing surveillance and police harassment.

After being held in jail for six months, the official one-count indictment against Balogun was illegal firearm possession, with prosecutors alleging he was prohibited from owning a gun due to a 2007 misdemeanor domestic assault case in Tennessee.

Balogun said that the Tennessee case stemmed from a dispute with a girlfriend and that he was pressured to plead guilty to get out of jail.

But this month (May 2018), a judge rejected the charge, saying the firearms law did not apply.

Balogun said he also had to accept the fact that the government would probably continue to monitor to him and could seek new ways to disrupt his life. But the threat wouldn’t stop him from organizing and speaking out.

The US attorney’s office and the FBI declined to comment.

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This case is very concerning to me, not as some might think because of a strong objection to FBI surveillance in an anti-terrorism case, but because there obviously was no case here to begin with.

When the only charge the government can bring is a one-count indictment for illegal firearms possession based on a misdemeanor case from 11 years ago, there is something seriously wrong with the government's conduct in this investigation.

How would you feel if government employees were maintaining secret, hidden files about you; making false allegations about you, and you were the subject of an on-going investigation that dragged on for months?