We're going to be talking about spying, surveillance, and civil rights today.

Although the issues are serious, I think it would nonetheless be fun to set the stage with

three little vignettes, all of which are pertinent to our discussion.

First, I think I have to give a brief mention to William Alvin Lloyd.

Lloyd was a con man, a bigamist, and a manager of a minstrel troop, among other things.

He claimed that in 1861, Abraham Lincoln hired him to work as Lincoln's personal

secret agent in the South during the Civil War. According to Lloyd, Lincoln made Lloyd swear that

this arrangement would remain a secret between just the two of them. He went to the South, was jailed for the

bigamy, got out, worked as a steamboat guide, got shot by a guy he tried to blackmail, got

jailed a couple other times, and somewhere in there, he claims, sent some intelligence

dispatches to Lincoln. Lincoln gets assassinated. Lloyd nonetheless

submits his bills to the government. He fabricated a contract and evidence, and he actually did get

some money, though not all he asked for, and he went off. After he died, as the state sued for the

rest of the money supposedly owed, and the case

went to the Supreme Court. The resulting decision, Totten v. United States, could be said to establish

one prong, at least, of what is today known as the state secrets privilege. What happened in short is that the

court said it could not even hear the case because the introduction of the evidence of the

contract itself would imperil national security. Second, in the 1950s and 60s, our government

did some very, very bad things.

Among its other abuses of power, it engaged in a lot of warrantless surveillance and

investigation of domestic groups. It deemed subversive. Such subversive groups included

anti-Vietnam War groups, the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King,

...