On NSPM-7 Anniversary, Defending Rights & Dissent Alerts Congress to FBI Monitoring of Political Speech

Can the FBI Spy on First Amendment Protected Activity? According to a new analysis of the FBI’s rules from Defending Rights & Dissent, the answer is yes. 

This morning, Defending Rights & Dissent delivered Can the FBI Spy on the First Amendment? to every Congressional office. The report exposes how the FBI has quietly put together internal rules for itself that blatantly permit spying on political speech. The report is released on the first anniversary of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo-7 (NSPM-7), which serves as the administration’s blueprint to crush domestic political opponents on the left. 

“With NSPM-7, Trump and Miller have made clear they plan to exploit the broad counterterrorism authorities of the executive branch to unleash this machinery of repression upon their domestic political opponents. Unless Congress acts now, they will get away with it. NSPM-7 requires no new laws, no new agencies, because well before Trump ever returned to power, the FBI and its enablers have amassed for itself the power to spy on pure political speech. And we know through our own work with the Freedom of Information Act, such surveillance is all too common. With the FBI, Trump and Miller were gifted the perfect weapon to use against its enemies. It is no wonder the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces are the centerpiece of NSPM-7,” said the report’s author Chip Gibbons. 

The report identifies NSPM-7 as a major escalation in Trump’s crackdown on dissent, while highlighting how the loose rules that have governed the FBI for a generation make that repression possible. The report shows how executive branch legal interpretations and court decisions have made the First Amendment’s protections for speech meaningless, by claiming the FBI may preemptively monitor speech on the grounds it is looking to prevent terrorism. It also analyzes in detail the FBI’s current rules, showing how they steer the intelligence agency towards political surveillance.    

The report calls on Congress to enact a series of reforms, including creating a statutory charter limiting the FBI’s investigative authorities, strengthening protections for political speech and organizing, and requiring a warrant for foreign intelligence searches.

The report was authored by Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons, a journalist and researcher whose work has appeared in Jacobin, The Intercept, Drop Site News, and The Nation. He is the author of a comprehensive new history of the FBI, The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the U.S. National Security State, forthcoming from Verso Books.

Download the full report here, or read it below: