Today’s word of the day, thanks to the Word Guru email, is extirpate. Extirpate is a verb that means “to remove or destroy totally; do away with” or “to pull up by or as if by the roots; root up” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/extirpate). Words derived from extirpate are extirpation, a noun, extirpative, an adjective, and extirpator, a noun (ibid.). The verb entered the language in the “1530s, usually figurative, from Latin extirpatus/exstirpatus, past participle of extirpare/exstirpare ‘root out, eradicate, pull up by the roots’” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=extirpate).

It is interesting that the word extirpation, which looks like it is derived from extirpate, actually entered the language before extirpate. It entered the language in the “early 15c., ‘removal;’ 1520s, ‘rooting out, eradication,’ from Latin extirpationem/exstirpationem (nominative extirpatio/exstirpatio), noun of action from past-participle stem of extirpare/exstirpare ‘root out,’ from ex ‘out’ (see ex-) + stirps (genitive stirpis) ‘a root, stock of a tree’” (ibid.). At some point in classical Latin the s was dropped because the sound of the letter x ends with the same sound made by the letter s.

There is a Latin synonym that also means to root out, eradicare, which gives us the word eradicate, which also means “to remove or destroy totally.” Eradicate clearly comes from the Latin word radix, which means “root” (“the love of money is the root of evil” in Latin is cupiditas radix malorum est).

On this date in 1970, according to On This Day, the NY Times published a false report that the US Army would no longer practice domestic surveillance.

Interestingly, that is not quite what the article in the Times said. The headline read, “ARMY ENDS WATCH ON CIVIL PROTESTS” (https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/27/archives/army-ends-watch-on-civil-protests.html). The article begins, “The Army will no longer keep tabs on peaceful demonstrations or publish a list of individuals who ‘might be involved’ in a riot, the chairman of the House Invasion of Privacy Subcommittee announced today” (ibid.). It says further, “Army general counsel, Robert E. Jordon 3d, [said] that all copies of its civil disturbance list ‘have been ordered withdrawn and destroyed.’”

Just two days later, the NY Times published an article revealing that NC Senator Sam Ervin had shared with the media that the US Army had been surveilling (that’s the current word for spying on) a Supreme Court Justice and numerous legislators: “A spokesman for Mr. Ervin said, however, that the subjects included Mr. Ervin, Senators Edmund S. Muskie, George McGovern, Edward M. Kennedy, Harold E. Hughes and Fred R. Harris and former Senators Ralph W. Yarborough and Eugene J. McCarthy” (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/29/archives/wider-army-surveillance-of-top-officials-disclosed-wider-army.html). The article continued with the names of some members of the House of Representatives and the Justice, who was probably Thurgood Marshall, though it wasn’t clear whether Marshall was surveilled as a Justice or when he was Soliciter General.

The February 29 report also said this: “The Army was ordered by senior civilian of the Johnson Administration in 1967 to 1968 to use its internal counter‐intelligence units to gather information that might indicate that civil disturbance was on the way. It was also ordered to collect information that might be useful to Army troops when they were sent into an area of strife.
“Civilian officials and military officers involved in the operation conceded later that directives intended to control the surveillance had been drawn toe loosely and that the operation had spilled over into watching legitimate political activity.”

This surveillance program, which spied mostly on Democrats, was initiated by the Johnson administration, and Johnson was a Democrat. But it was an horrendous misuse of Army intelligence and of the Army itself. The US Army is supposed to defend the country against foreign enemies. Even today domestic surveillance requires approval by the FISA court (from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). The FISA court was set up in 1978, and if you read the wiki on it, you’ll learn that the law was passed in response to Richard Nixon’s use of federal agencies for the purpose of domestic surveillance: “The FISA resulted from extensive investigations by Senate Committees into the legality of domestic intelligence activities. These investigations were led separately by Sam Ervin and Frank Church in 1978 as a response to President Richard Nixon‘s usage of federal resources, including law enforcement agencies, to spy on political and activist groups” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act).

But as we have seen from the NY Times, illegal domestic surveillance preceded the Nixon administration. Furthermore, the FISA court has done very little to prevent domestic surveillance since the passage of the bill in 1978. For instance, during the term of Donald Trump, the FBI got the FISA court to approve surveillance of Trump aid Carter Page in relation to the Russian Collusion Probe. But “The Justice Department (DOJ) has acknowledged that it lacked probable cause to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in at least two of four warrant applications – all of which were granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)” (https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/justice-dept-admitted-it-lacked-probable-cause-carter-page-fisas).

According to the Center for Democracy and Technology, “The FBI and DOJ have repeatedly said that misuse of the FBI’s power to query Section 702 data can be addressed with internal reforms, such as training, re-training, higher levels of required approval and changes to minimization procedures. These reforms have repeatedly failed to deliver the protections promised. Now, the FBI and DOJ are again telling Congress that internal querying reforms that have been put in place will address current misuse.  But they offer no reason to expect any better result than internal measures have provided in the past. Congress should reject these assurances and require external review of US person queries— by a judge assessing whether there is probable cause — to head off further misuse of Section 702” (https://cdt.org/insights/fisa-section-702-issue-brief-fbis-misuse-of-fisa-702-in-past-indicates-that-its-procedural-reforms-will-not-break-pattern-of-misuse-in-the-future/).

But an external review by a judge who is also part of the government would not reassure me, at least, that the government is now, finally, not engaged in illegal domestic surveillance. The government’s spying on people goes back at least to 1967 and probably long before that (remember that the FDR administration interned Japanese- and German-Americans during WWII. Maybe it’s time to root out all domestic surveillance.

The image today is a photo uploaded to Flickr on October 28, 2013. It’s from the “Stop Watching Us Rally Against NSA Surveillance,” which took place on October 26, 2013, after Edward Snowdon revealed that the NSA was surveilling American citizens. “Stop Watching Us was sponsored by an unusually broad coalition of left- and right-wing groups, including everything from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Green Party, Color of Change and Daily Kos to the Libertarian Party, FreedomWorks and Young Americans for Liberty” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/26/nsa-rally-stop-watching-washington-snowden). I like that people on both sides of the political spectrum were able to unite, at least once.