Documents Reveal 2005 FBI Surveillance of Texas ISO, Anti-War Activists

FBI Agents Spied On ISO’s Texas Socialist Conference At UT-Austin

Archival records reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted an extensive surveillance operation targeting the International Socialist Organization over a 6 month period in 2005.

The records were released in March 2023, but seem to have gone unnoticed until now. The FBI regularly publishes documents on The Vault, its public records archive. The documents remain partially redacted, and do not appear to be the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Texas Surveillance Operation

The 41 page set of documents include multiple reports of FBI operations dating between April 2005 and February of 2006, as well as an earlier file on the ISO from 1986.

Initial Incident

The last document in the set is the earliest dated, detailing an investigation conducted on April 13, 2005 by an FBI special agent. The 1-page report is heavily redacted, but details the arrest of an unnamed activist which occurred at the University of Texas, Austin campus. Protestors used air horns to disrupt a speaker. 6 of the 20 protestors were arrested, and then followed a camp-out outside the jail where the protests were held. The redacted information suggests that the agent had some insight into the inner workings of the group and interest in its leadership. The document then notes that one of those arrested was affiliated with Dirty South Earth First, but not the ISO. Presumably it was this incident which set off the later series of investigations, possibly resulting from an earlier monitoring of eco-terrorist elements.

Launching A Preliminary Investigation

The first document in the set is dated August 5, 2005, and relays to the Counterterrorism department the beginning of a Preliminary Inquiry (PI) Investigation into the International Socialist Organization. The PI has a duration of 180 days. The document claims that the ISO in Austin has become more aggressive, detailing accounts of the April 2005 protest, and a redacted section presumably note the participation of the above-mentioned eco-radical activist. The PI also notes ISO participation in protests in May of 2005, including a protest of a Haliburton meeting in Houston, Texas. Vice President Dick Cheney was the former CEO of Haliburton, which profited from the Iraq War and became a major target of public ire. The PI also notes the ISO’s employment of black-bloc tactics during an anti-Klan rally in June of 2005. The PI also notes that Austin will be the site of an important conference in May of 2006, The World Congress of Information Technology, which could be the site of future protest, with anticipated guests including President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The PI asserts that “the UT branch of the ISO may be serving as an umbrella organization for other extremist groups,” and again notes that at least one ISO member may have ties to Earth First and the Earth Liberation Front, and Black Block, “an anarchist group which espouses extremely violent tactics to bring about change.” 

The document asserts that the ISO’s activities have met the Attorney General’s guidelines for opening a Terrorism Enterprise Investigation.

The Preliminary Investigation

The above document dated August 5, 2005 marked the beginning of a 6 month period of surveillance of the ISO.

On September 9, 2005 FBI agents surveilled an ISO led meeting/rally, although “It appeared no one from the ISO attended their own meeting”

The file then includes a clipping of an article of the ISO disrupting a US army recruitment event on campus.

A document dated October 14 then details an upcoming ISO conference, the Texas Socialist Conference, to be hosted on November 5, 2005. The title of the conference is “War, Racism, and Poverty: The Need For an Alternative.”

The next document appears to be a news round-up by an agent on the ISO and other similar organizations detailing protests around the country. 

Another document details that the FBI warned that the ISO may participate in disrupting a speaker on November 17.

Additional documents including one dated November 18 details FBI surveillance of the November 5 Texas Socialism Conference and protests on November 15 and 17. The document reveals that at least 13 agents were involved in surveillance of the November 5 meeting, including “lookout-physical surveillance.” Agents stationed themselves on the north, west, and east sides of Parlin Hall, and some redactions may hide that at least one agent was inside the hall or even within the meeting. The agents then followed the ISO meeting attendees as they left the meeting to attend an anti-Klan rally, noting the car which they entered and their identifications. It seems probable that agents had access to cell phone calls or other data of the attendees, as they seemed to know that an ISO activist had contacted another activist to coordinate their arrival to the protest. 

The documents also detail the communication and coordination between the FBI and the university police.

The file also includes numerous citations or submissions for citations for agents involved in these activities, for their participation in counter-terrorism activities.

Finally, a document from 1986 contains a letter written by a Northwestern University student in which that student complains to the FBI that their friend has been brainwashed by the ISO. The student highlights the influence of a foreign-born ISO “cult leader,” presumably Irish or English, and requests that the FBI deport them.

It is not clear whether the investigation continued for the full duration of the Preliminary Investigation period, or past it up until the May 2006 conference.

What We Can Learn

The fact that the FBI has surveilled socialist or anti-war activists should not come as a surprise to anyone. The FBI has a long history of surveillance, or more accurately, for the FBI’s entire history, it has surveilled socialist activists. Works like FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit against Government Spying relay the incredible lengths which the FBI went in spying on and disrupting Trotskyists as part of the larger COINTEL program.

However, while FBI surveillance of left-wing groups is relatively well documented between its founding and the end of the COINTELPRO period, more recent evidence of FBI spying is less well substantiated. If the purpose of FBI surveillance was to suppress the left when it challenged the US ruling class, it is reasonable to ask whether this became less relevant with the collapse of the American left in the three decades from Reagan until Occupy. But it would be totally wrong to assume without evidence that this type of surveillance was discontinued. And in addition to the comprehensive digital-enable surveillance which has been well substantiated, specific targeting of the left has continued, at least to some degree. One incident of note was the 2010 FBI raids on the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. A counter-protest I helped organize against a Ben Shapiro event at UCLA in 2017 was also the subject of FBI surveillance. Every data-point in this period helps us to better understand the scope, purpose, and methods of this type of police spying.

What the above incident shows is that the FBI was willing to use the pretext of counter-terrorism to surveille the ISO based on the thin justification that at least one member or known associate was in a movement adjacent to eco-terrorism, and that the ISO engaged in black-block tactics or other unruly behavior at protests.

The FBI’s monitoring not only of potentially violent protests, but also of meetings and conferences of a purely political nature is also highly concerning.

What is still hidden in the set of documents can also be revealing when understood in the correct context. An educated estimate suggests that not only personal identifying material, but quite important details of the investigation are still being withheld from the public, hiding the full extent of the spying on the ISO. And these are just the documents the government chose to release.

Although the ISO is now dissolved, the DSA today, or at least some of its members as individuals, often employ the similar disruptive direct action or semi-black-block tactics which the FBI used to justify its spying on the ISO. So there should be no doubt that if the FBI wanted to create a justification for targeting DSA, they could. And probably they are. 

Add to this, the massive proliferation both of the use of information technology and the means of surveilling information technology which have developed since 2005. The FBI would hardly need “physical lookouts” to monitor protest participants, considering that investigations by Snowden and others have revealed that the US government has a back-door to every major hardware or software product.

This is not to mention the escalation of the disregard for the law which is now taking place under Trump’s second term. While we should be careful not to view the past with a naive lens — Bush, Obama, and virtually every preceding administration also broke the law in terms of surveillance and detention of dissidents — it is undoubtedly true that Trump will take this tendency to new heights.