Donner, Frank. Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 503 pages.

As a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union Project on Political Surveillance and someone who had been identified as a Communist in front of Congressional committees during the 1950s, it's not surprising that Connecticut-based attorney Frank Donner (1911-1993) emerged as the foremost scholar of U.S. domestic political surveillance. He wrote two major books on the subject: "The Age of Surveillance" (1981) on political intelligence by federal agencies, and "Protectors of Privilege" (1990), which looks at surveillance by police departments in major U.S. cities.

"Protectors of Privilege" is a book that could not have been written had it not been for a broad coalition of citizen groups in major U.S. cities that addressed the issue of police intelligence during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The ACLU and American Friends Service Committee helped with the organizing, and by the mid-1980s many major cities had enacted laws that forced their respective police departments to reveal and/or destroy their political intelligence files, and curtail their activities. This was the case in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia, each of which gets its own chapter in this book. Other chapters cover lesser cities and provide historical background dating from the turn of the century.
ISBN 0-520-08035-1

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