It was just a normal school day in Lebanon. I don’t remember the exact date but it would have been sometime in the late 1950’s. An office aide entered my classroom and I heard the teacher call my name, asking me to come to her desk. She had a strange look on her face as she told me to go to the principal’s office with the aide.
Never in all my years of school had I ever been sent to the principal’s office. I was too scared to even wonder what I had done wrong as the office girl walked me down the hall.
Once inside Mr. Rainey’s office, I saw a couple of people standing there including a strange man dressed in a dark suit. I remember he looked rather ominous.
He asked me my name and when I told him, he handed me a post card, asking me if I had ever seen it before. I recognized it as a card I had sent a week or so before to The Daily Worker, the newspaper published at that time in New York City by the Communist Party USA, asking them to send me a couple of issues of their paper.
I acknowledged that I had sent the card. He asked why. I explained that I was writing a report for one of my classes and I had chosen to write about the Communist Party. This was in the middle of the Cold War period and even back then I was very much attuned to political issues.
I had always been very competitive about my grades, so I had “googled” the Communist Party and found out about The Daily Worker. Just kidding, there were no computers, no Google search engines back then. Doing research meant going to the local library and perusing recent issues of the Reader’s Guide, an obscure digest of periodical literature, with print even smaller than the directions on the present day medical bottle.
A couple hours of work might yield enough resource material for a presentable school research paper, but after getting those citations, I had to find the actual newspapers and magazines to locate the pertinent article. That meant having the librarian take me back into the archives to dig through dusty stacks of material. But again, no copy machine back in those days so I had to take tedious notes on each article in longhand.
It was not easy work, but the anticipation of getting the highest grade in the class was worth it. Plus, truth be told, I’ ve always loved doing research. Tracking down clues and putting the pieces together is just way too much fun.
So I tried to explain all this to the unsmiling stranger in the principal’s office, who I later found out really was an FBI investigator apparently intent on ferreting out a secret Communist cell group in Lebanon Missouri, led by a skinny teenage girl, as I was back then. But that’s the way it was during the McCarthy era in the 50’s. Everybody was guilty until proven innocent.
Apparently my teachers were eventually able to allay his fears by convincing him I was just an innocent student who tended to be an over-achiever and not a threat to the U.S. government. So I was “let go” after my brief and sole encounter with the law.
I ran across that essay recently (yes, I really do keep everything), and smiled as I remembered the incident and noting I did receive a very good grade on it.
As I recount this story to you today, with every channel on my television set and every news agency I subscribe to on my tablet blaring out the most recent “breaking news” about the firing of FBI director Jim Comey, I am most cognizant of how different things are today with the FBI.
The AP ran a story last month about how the FBI is changing under the leadership of Mr. Comey and I am assuming that many of these changes will persist even though he is no longer at the helm.
The Bureau is considering adjusting its hiring requirements to attract top-notch cyber recruits in order to compete with private sector companies in its efforts to confront “increasingly complex cyber challenges,” including crippling foreign state-sponsored attacks. And it acknowledges a need to develop more sophisticated techniques for combating internet-based threats.
After the embarrassing incident with Apple last year when law enforcement had to go to a third-party vendor to come forward with a tool to open an encrypted cell phone of a criminal suspect, the Bureau acknowledged the fact that they were concerned about electronic terrorism recruitment that occurs through encrypted channels and out of sight of investigators.
“The world’s not coming back. The old school stuff that I did 20,30 years ago in the State Police and the FBI, all those crimes nowadays have a major cyber component to it,” said Robert Anderson, a retired FBI executive assistant director who oversaw cyber investigations.
Anderson went on to say, “Anything new in the government is like getting your wisdom teeth pulled out. Anything new takes a while for the culture of the FBI to adjust to it.”
I’m just glad there was no social media back in the fifties, or I would probably have posted my request for information about the Communist Party on Facebook, and the outcome of my story might not have been so good.
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