http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/10/MNG0996S3P1.DTLexcerpt:
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI targeted Savio because he was the nation's first prominent student leader of the '60s, and top FBI officials feared protests would spread from Berkeley to other schools, the records show.
The bureau used tactics against Savio that Congress in 1976 found were improper -- including some similar to investigative methods that agents may now use against suspected terrorists under the Patriot Act and under loosened FBI guidelines, experts said.
According to hundreds of pages of FBI files -- and, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, as reported in today's Chronicle Magazine -- the bureau:
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-- Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
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David Sobel, general counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C., group that has challenged some of the government's efforts to expand the collection of personal information, said many of the tactics used against Savio -- such as putting his name on "watch lists" and collecting personal financial data and school records -- are "ancestors" of current surveillance systems. He said Savio's case was a "cautionary tale" about how the combination of power and secrecy can lead to intelligence abuses.
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