The FBI has also linked virtually every police department in the country electronically into its National Crime Information Center, which maintains a computerized file of all wanted persons in the country. Until last year, police departments seeking to know whether a suspect was wanted elsewhere in the country had to wait days or weeks while the Bureau searched the file manually. Now, they can query the computer directly, without going through the Bureau, and an answer is often forth-coming in a matter of seconds.
The Bureau also maintains a National Criminal History file, linked to local police by the same computer teletype. An estimated 30,000,000 persons--roughly 30 per cent of all adult Americans--have entries in this file. Although it is called a "Criminal History" file, it consists in large part of records simply showing that an individual has been arrested and released or acquitted.
The "National Criminal History" file has brought the FBI into the nation's economic life as a broker of employment for private and semi-private corporations. To corporations. Aryeh Neier wrote in his paper for the conference, the decision to hire or not to hire someone is a matter of statistics. While an individual may not have done anything, statistically a number of those who have been arrested are criminals. The safest bet is not to hire anyone who has ever been arrested at all.
Although the information in the file is intended for law enforcement purposes, local police and FBI offices regularly make it available to banks, insurance companies, and other government agencies, Neier said. In some cases, this is done on an informal reciprocal basis--the banks responding by willingly making available bank records of persons under investigation without the necessity of a subpoena. In many cases, however, the arrests records are used under legal requirements; as an example, a New York State law requires that all prospective employees of securities firms be checked against the arrest records. Neier concluded that as long as such a file is extant, it will be used to punish persons who have not been convicted of any crime by depriving them of a livelihood.
The Bureau's usefulness as an employment agency is not the only interface between the FBI and the American corporate structure. FBI agents often find lucrative jobs with corporations after leaving the Bureau. Turner reports that certain corporations--such as Sears-Roebuck and the Ford Motor Co.--were know to all agents in the Bureau as good places to apply. Ford employs nearly 30 agents in its central management, dozens more in subsidiaries (not surprisingly, Ford sponsored "The FBI" during its early years on television). The Society of Former Agents of the FBI, an independent alumni organization set up to keep those who have left the Bureau in touch with the "FBI family," maintains a placement bureau which finds good jobs for its members.
Former agents dominate the private security industry; Fidelifacts, Inc., and The Wackenhut Agency, two of the largest nationwide investigation and protection firms, are both headed and largely staffed by former agents. Vince Gillen, the private investigator for General Motors who sought damaging information on Ralph Nader, is a former agent.
The FBI also has alumni in government and the bureaucracy, including the current head of the Secret Service, nearly a dozen Congressmen, the Attorney General of California, and the Governor of New Jersey.
The increasing penetration of the FBI into local law enforcement, government, private industry, and citizens' political affairs, some participants in the conference felt, could lead to a nationwide surveillance mentality, a society-wide "chilling effect."
The "chilling effect" is a legal term describing deadening of free expression caused by government intervention. When the FBI takes an interest in lawful activities of citizens, even those who know that they have done nothing wrong--those most convinced that activities of which the Bureau disapproves are nonetheless legitimate--aften have a momentary feeling that they just may be guilty of something.
The effect on those less committed to the conduct which has made them surveillance objects--e.g., a young man or woman simply toying with the idea of entering a political group which the Bureau does not sanction--is much more severe. Government investigation of an activity marks it as illicit and dangerous. Its objects might reasonably fear that they will have difficulty getting jobs and will be shunned by suspicious neighbors. A widespread surveillance mentality could deaden our political life and make movements for change nearly impossible.
In his paper on informers. Frank Donner cites an extreme case of the effects of the surveillance mentality. Ernest A. Weiners, a professor at New York State University, committed suicide in 1967 after it was revealed that the FBI had recruited on of his academic colleagues as an informer to gather information on his activities in a civil rights group. In a letter found after his death. Wiener wrote. "It is too painful to continue living in a world in which freedom of expression is steadily being constricted in the name of freedom and in which peace means war, in which every one of our institutions, our schools, our churches, our newspapers, our industries are being steadily engulfed in a sea of hypocrisy.