Are FBI Files Now Required for Civic Life?

The White House file scandal is now in full tilt. Clinton cover stories are blown. This was a Watergate-style plumbers’ caper. The two White House people ordering up the dirt files--D. Craig Livingstone, director of personnel security, and Army detailee (from its criminal investigation division) Anthony Marceca--are Democratic Party operatives. “Operative” in this context usually means someone with lots of pals in law enforcement who knows how to get his hands on files, criminal records, tax info and other useful political ammunition.

But amid the uproar over the hundreds of FBI files that ended up in Livingstone’s hands and were circulated around the White House, something fundamental is being ignored. It’s what is wrong with the following sentence from a report in the Los Angeles Times: “As the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings, Democrats joined Republicans in condemning the White House for invading the privacy of the hundreds of individuals by wrongly obtaining their FBI files.”

Are we now to assume that an FBI file doesn’t constitute an invasion of privacy, that having an FBI file is somehow part of civic life, like having a driver’s license?

One of the glories of the United States is its constitutional freedoms, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. These rights--among them freedom of speech, freedom from illegal search and seizure, freedom from self-incrimination--are supposedly inalienable.

But here we have public officials going to work at the White House and other security-sensitive posts, immediately imposed with an FBI security check that makes it a condition of the job--upholding the Constitution--that they demonstrate that they willingly submit to violations of the Constitution. As secretary of state, George Shultz may once have refused to submit to a lie detector test because the request was demeaning and absurd, but most people confronted by an FBI security check no doubt prefer to waive their inalienable constitutional rights rather than lose their fine new job at the White House, State Department or wherever.

The FBI reviews subjects’ criminal, financial, medical and motor-vehicle histories. All this pushes way past the 4th and 5th amendments. One person from Los Angeles under security review before getting a job at the White House (she’d already had to go through an identical check at another federal agency) found herself signing a waiver so that the FBI could go interview her therapist. Fortunately, the Catholic Church still has enough clout to prevent G-men from demeaning the secrets of the confessional.

What does an FBI background check involve? The congressional inquiry foolishly limited its terms of reference to FBI files, though it is pertinent to ask whether material from other agencies, such as IRS, NSA, CIA, DIA and Army intelligence also ended up in those folders. The IRS has denied that it released any individual’s returns. Maybe so. But the FBI could probably get most of what it wanted from the subject’s bank manager.

We are approaching total transparency in these matters. A friend of mine is currently seeking a bank loan--about $100,000--to expand his successful small business. He’s paid for appraisals. He’s spent a month building a file. Suddenly the bank has presented him with a form, demanding that he sign away all the protections afforded him by the Constitution, not to mention the Privacy Act, giving the bank the right to get all his tax returns from the IRS via computer. Meanwhile, the bank also has required my friend to disclose all details of any criminal record and confer on the bank the right to obtain police files and reports. The landlord of my friend’s prospective premises has demanded that he waive all rights to a jury trial in the event of a business dispute.

So at the very moment that the IRS says tax returns are sacrosanct, the bank is making ordinary loan purchasers sign away their rights to privacy and to freedom from self-incrimination. Government, bank and landlord are as one.

The ACLU or kindred watchdog group should immediately advertise its eagerness to take up the cudgels for anyone entering government who refuses to comply with intrusive and absurd security checks. Let Congress find out how much money is spent compiling dirt files and then let it cut the relevant budget by that amount.

It’s not as though these FBI checks impede the entry of murderers, thieves, drunks, bankrupts and other “security lapses.” Security checks are part of the arsenal of the blackmailer, whether state or private. They should burn those files and the millions more alongside them.