The cruel irony is that we probably need new Church Committee-style investigations more today than ever before, but the political will simply doesn’t exist. Why? Because the surveillance state has become bipartisan orthodoxy.
Sounds unrealistic, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly what went down in 1975.
Scandalous Revelations, Nothing Changes!
When three different investigative committees were formed to check why the land of the free has gradually turned into a surveillance state. The Senate’s Church Committee, the Pike Committee in the House of Representatives, and the Rockefeller Commission, ordained directly by the White House, where the 38th US President Gerald Ford resided.
38 years later, despite all the scandalous revelations these three committees uncovered, all the reforms and tight oversight mechanisms, an NSA intelligence coordinator turned whistle-blower called Edward Snowden, decided to travel to Hong Kong, and leak classified documents to four journalists, that disclosed proof that the US surveillance apparatus had grown monstrously more invasive than anything the 1975 committees have uncovered.
So, what did that 1975 presidential and congressional theatre really accomplish?
A question that should make every US citizen pause.
The Tip of the Dirty Iceberg
The trigger wasn’t subtle. Watergate shocked the American public and spurred many of its representatives in Congress to demand an investigation into the past activities of [the FBI, CIA, NSA, and others. What emerged was a systematic pattern of domestic surveillance that would make any authoritarian regime proud.
The committee held a series of public hearings in September and October 1975 to educate the American public about the “unlawful or improper conduct” of the intelligence community, highlighting a few carefully “selected cases” of misconduct.
That’s diplomatic language for “the tip of a very dirty iceberg.” Their hearings exposed secret, arguably illegal wiretapping, bugging, and harassment of American citizens, including Supreme Court justices, reporters, and government officials, all in the name of collecting intelligence about threats to national security.
Let that sink in, Supreme Court justices, who are supposed to serve as the ultimate check on government power, were actually being surveilled by this very government.
If American citizens can digest this, then I guess nothing could ever upset their collective stomach.
Three Committees, One Inconvenient Truth
The Committee, established in the US Senate, was named after its Chairman and Democratic Senator from Idaho, Frank Church, and was the most significant and meticulous of the three aforementioned investigative committees.
While the House Pike Committee, chaired by Democratic House Representative Otis Pike of New York, focused more on intelligence failures and budget accountability. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Commission served as President Gerald Ford’s attempt to control the narrative and manage the public perception.
The Church Committee explored CIA assassination plots in detail at the outset of the inquiry and issued an interim public report on 20 November 1975.
Turns out that America’s intelligence agencies weren’t just reading mail and tapping phones, they were actively plotting to kill foreign leaders, while they were enjoying listening to American telephone calls.
But here’s where it gets interesting from a power dynamics perspective: The revealed documents expose President Ford Administration’s continuous withholding of Intelligence from the Church Committee.
Isn’t this the perfect reminder of President George W. Bush’s White House resistance to cooperation with the 9/11 Commission investigation, and the expansion of “limited review processes” and “secrecy policies”?
As Congress was supposedly conducting serious oversight, the executive branch was still playing games, withholding information and setting precedents for the secrecy claims that would become routine since 9/11.
Updated Oversight, Sophisticated Unlawfulness
The three committees did produce some reforms. FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the federal law enacted in 1978, has established a secret court system, officially called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to oversee and “approve” requests for surveillance warrants.
So, despite new oversight mechanisms being put in place, and budgets being made a bit more transparent, what really occurred is that the intelligence community just learned how to be more careful and subtle, not out of respect for civil liberties, they actually changed their practices to lessen the chanced of them being caught red-handed.
What Snowden leaked in 2013, about the NSA collecting data, including telephone and internet communications metadata, revealed that the scale of unlawful mass surveillance, dwarfs whatever the Church, Pike, and Rockefeller Committees have uncovered in 1975.
So only the metrics have changed, scale, subtlety, and sophistication, but the practices still prevail.
The Contemporary Surveillance Paradox
Here’s what’s truly remarkable about today’s situation: we live in an era where private companies know more about individual Americans than the CIA ever dreamed of knowing in 1975, yet we’re simultaneously more surveilled by government agencies than ever before.
The “reforms” that emerged from the 1970s oversight committees created a legal framework that legitimized surveillance rather than constraining it. Later estimates provided by U.S. officials were in the order of 1.7 million documents Snowden accessed, revealing programs that made the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations look primitive by comparison.
The National Security Agency was virtually collecting electronic communications in wholesale, to be stored forever, and looking into them with no judicial oversight or interference whatsoever, after the warranting stage.
See the pattern? Illegal surveillance, official intelligence denial, eventual scandalous whistleblowing, then, all ends with minimal consequences and token changes.
Who’s Watching the Watchers?
It’s amazing enough that the intelligence community can spy on justices of the SCOTUS, who are supposed to be the supreme judiciary monitor on their invasive powers.
But the cruel irony is that we probably need new Church Committee-style investigations more today than ever before, but the political will simply doesn’t exist. Why? Because the surveillance state has become bipartisan orthodoxy.
Democrats and Republicans may disagree on healthcare, taxes, immigration, and frivolous identity politics, but they’re remarkably united on the need for expansive intelligence capabilities.
Consider this: For the first time, the personal information of non-U.S. citizens now can only be kept for five years, the same length as Americans’ data. That’s presented as a reform, but think about what it actually means: the government considers it normal to store everyone’s personal information for five years
The Church Committee revealed that intelligence agencies were collecting information on Americans without cause. Today, that’s not a scandal, it’s policy.
The Missing Oversight
How should Congress exercise its oversight of intelligence agencies? This remains a crucial question, but one that Congress seems increasingly uninterested in answering meaningfully. The intelligence committees that were created as a result of the 1970s investigations have largely been captured by the agencies they’re supposed to oversee.
The American version of intelligence oversight happens almost entirely in classified settings where the public can’t evaluate whether their representatives are actually protecting their interests or simply rubber-stamping whatever the agencies want.
Real Question, Intuitive Answer
Here’s what we should be asking: if the Church Committee, Pike Committee, and Rockefeller Commission revealed systematic lawbreaking and abuse fifty years ago, and if Edward Snowden revealed even more extensive lawbreaking and abuse just over a decade ago, and if courts have repeatedly ruled that surveillance programs were unlawful, why do we keep having the same conversation?
The answer is uncomfortable but obvious: because the oversight system isn’t designed to constrain the surveillance state, it’s designed to legitimize it. We need new oversight committees with real power, real independence, and real consequences for lawbreaking.
But more importantly, we need to ask ourselves whether we actually want them, or whether we’ve simply become comfortable living in a surveillance state as long as it’s wrapped in the language of national security and constitutional compliance.
The Church Committee’s legacy isn’t the reforms it produced, as most of them have been either undermined or circumvented. Its real legacy is the proof that American democracy is capable of meaningful self-examination when the political will exists.
The question is whether that political will still exist today, or whether we’ve simply decided that privacy and civil liberties are luxuries we can’t afford?
Does any of us even need to answer this question?
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
