Fbi files on me

It is about the creation of a more hospitable political climate for U. The report mentions Foucault three times in less than a handful of sentences. Rockhill, however, goes even further than this view. He latches onto the meager words about Foucault in the CIA report as damning proof that the agency considered him an unwitting asset.

Yet there is nothing in the CIA report to suggest that the agency had subjected Foucault to espionage, and there was no reason to turn to espionage for the information about him in the report because that information dealt with episodes in his political life that were all part of a very public conversation in France. The identification of Foucault as an unwitting CIA asset thus springs from an astonishing sleight of hand.

Foucault signed a petition published in January calling for a demonstration in front of the U. These details may tempt one to joke that if Foucault was an asset of the CIA, he was going about his job in a terribly unsatisfactory manner. Another approach is to critically engage its content by questioning its premises, challenging the accuracy of its claims, and considering other historical and political details. The problem with the first approach is obvious: ignoring an allegation on grounds that it lacks intellectual respectability is no guarantee that it will go away.

I have opted, to some extent, for the second approach. Rockhill raises the important question of the relationship between the U. How exactly did this state view Foucault? How did it respond to him? What can that response tell us about the U.

Far from complicity, what stands out in the FBI file on Foucault is an anxiety about his Communist past. This anxiety was so great that Foucault was outright denied visas to visit the United States throughout most of the s. He only managed to visit the country after applying for visa ineligibility waivers and undergoing additional security screenings through the U. Embassy in Paris. The imposition of these additional administrative rituals suggests that the U.

To put matters in more polemical but still cautious terms, the only file on Foucault from a U. Far from deterring me, however, the knowledge that someone had already gone down this path left me wondering why something as ostensibly intriguing as an FBI file on Foucault had not garnered more attention. The file consists of only six pages. The first page is not even part of the original materials in the file.

The remaining five pages consist of two routing slips, two records forms, and a Memorandum from September 26, to the Acting Director of the FBI, all covered in stamps, markings, unintelligible scribbles, and signatures. The memorandum lends an intelligibility to the remaining documents in the file on Foucault. Those documents concern action requests over his visa status for the FBI director that emanated from the U. Embassy in Paris in April and March These details are of course quite fascinating.

What was in the other eleven pages of the FBI file on him and would it be possible to obtain them? To my surprise, it took the agency only a little over a month to respond substantively to my request in spite of a slowdown in the processing of FOIA requests due to the coronavirus pandemic. I received a response in the form of a PDF file from the FBI on July 13, , hoping that the file would be a fount of further revelations about the relationship between the U.

And I could not help but wonder whether it would show that he had been subjected to surveillance. It turns out that the missing pages would be deeply illuminating, but not in the manner I had expected.

There is no variation in the underlying logic of the treatment of him in the ensemble of these newly released documents. Michel Foucault is ineligible under Section a 28 of the Act due to former membership in the French Communist Party from to Recent security checks have been negative and the alien has had several waivers in the past.

He now wishes to accept an offer from the University of California at Berkeley to participate in academic conferences.

He has a valid DSP for the period of his stay. In the interest of promoting cultural exchange between France and the United States, the Embassy recommends that a waiver be granted. Section a of the Act concerns grounds for inadmissibility to the United States. Embassy in Paris conducted security investigations into Foucault. It also indicates that he had received two previous visa ineligibility waivers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Frankfurt, Germany.

First, it aligns perfectly with the number of times that Foucault visited the United States prior to September , according to his partner Daniel Defert. Defert recounts that Foucault visited the country for the first time in March and then again in March Indeed, the file contains no documents prior to that month. One can therefore safely presume that more materials on Foucault exist or have existed among the U.

The additional pages on Foucault from the FBI paint a more complete picture of the way in which the agency viewed him. What, then, would be the importance of the whole FBI on Foucault, at least as it is publicly available at this moment?

Yet Foucault himself underscored the importance of such administrative documents in the production of modern subjectivity. There is always an administrative organism capable of saying at any moment who each one of us is, and the state can, when it wants to, follow our entire past. Visibility in turn offers the possibility of a prompt punitive response to the acts of these individuals as well as to their potential behavior.

It constitutes an individual identity and imposes it on us through disciplinary mechanisms of visibility and writing. From this perspective, the FBI file on Foucault tied him to an individual identity he had long rejected.

And there would be something terribly fitting about revealing the subjection of the most distinguished theorist of surveillance in modern life to the surveillance of the domestic intelligence agency of the United States; it would serve to dramatize his views about the generalization of mechanisms of surveillance in the exercise of disciplinary power and their appropriation by the state.

I initially approached the FBI file on Foucault tantalized by this possibility, but its contents did not live up to my expectations. Some details and, more importantly, omissions in the file grated against what I thought I might find in it. On the one hand, the FBI file on Foucault incarnates a visibility in the sense of an accumulation of written observations about him. The U. Embassy in Paris also subjected Foucault to rounds of security investigations that consistently did not churn up anything prejudicial to his visits to the United States.

A Freedom of Information Act Request requires that you write a detailed letter specifying the information you desire. Then, send the form or letter to the FBI via mail, fax, or email. If your request is denied, you have the option to write a letter of appeal to send to the Department of Justice.

For more advice from our Legal co-author, including how to draft an effective appeal letter, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article.

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Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Article Summary. Co-authored by Clinton M. Method 1. Draft a FOIA request. When requesting your personal FBI records through the Freedom of Information Act, you must draft a detailed letter specifically requesting the information that you desire and any information that can help the FBI identify the records.

Date range of the request. You can make the request from your date of birth to the present. Description of the request. Request copies of all information, including but not limited to files, correspondence, reports, surveillance or any other records concerning you. Provide information to assist in the search. You should give your name, date of birth, social security number, place of birth and the first and last names of your parents, any aliases that you use, and former addresses.

Indicate a dollar amount that you are willing to pay for processing the request. State that you are seeking the information for personal use and not for commercial use. Provide your name, address, phone number and email address. Submit your request. Since you are requesting FBI records for a living person, you must submit your request either by mail, fax or e-mail. In addition to the PDF, you should put your request in the body of the email.

Check the status of the request. Wait to be contacted. If you have an extremely large file, your may be contacted by a negotiator to help narrow down the search parameters. Once the search is complete, you will receive a letter explaining any exemptions that were used to justify not sending you certain records, as well as a copy of the records that were not exempted.

The letter will also indicate the number of pages that were reviewed and the number of pages that were released to you. Method 2. Complete Certification of Identify Form. The U. Department of Justice system related to him or herself. Complete the fillable form by typing in all requested information. You can save the completed form as a PDF or print the completed form.

Draft a letter request, in the alternative. If you prefer to draft a letter request instead of using the Certification of Identify Form, the DOJ will also accept a letter. You letter must include the following information: The full name of the requestor. Your citizenship status and social security number. Your current address. Your date of birth and place of birth. You must also include the following oath: I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct, and that I am the person named above, and I understand that any falsification of this statement is punishable under the provisions of 18 U.

You must print your name, sign, and date the document.