FBI Homepage

The FBI Home Page, the centre of the FBI's online presence, is a more comprehensive and complex entity than the FOIA site, combining a historical perspective on the institution with coverage of its contemporary activities. This analysis will focus mostly on the historical component of the Home Page, although instances where contemporary material can shed light on historical themes will also be discussed.   Looking at the FBI Home Page in light of its companion site, we can detect many common narratives at work.

Structure

The FBI Home Page is a formidably well constructed public relations site. It includes a Press Room containing FBI press releases, and several other sections: among these are Employment, For the Family, Terrorism and Most Wanted, each with its own feature articles and links to other sites. Thus the FBI Homepage is not a closed site: it contains links to other parts of the World Wide Web (mostly law enforcement agencies, newspapers and other 'official' sources of information. ) The use of links, the presentation of material online, and the exploitation of the Internet's multimedia potential are all more developed in this site than in the FOIA site. This is not particularly surprising - the latter site serves largely as an archival 'dumping ground' for material that the FBI would not have wished made public at all. By contrast, the FBI Home Page is a public locus of the FBI's self-definition - an activity on which it has traditionally expended much energy.

The site has a particular interest in constructing the FBI's historical legacy in a way that legitimises it in the public eye, and its Library and Reference Section is of considerable size and significance. While most of the material placed on the site is non-interactive, there is a section, FBI Chats, which hosts a discussion between FBI agents and the online community. ( This makes for the occasional interesting exchange - like the predictable one that brings together the prosaic 'G-Man' and the guy with a weird theory about September 11)

Purpose

As mentioned above, the FBI Home Page, as the online seat of the FBI's public relations effort, is manifestly biased in its selection and presentation of material. The site's historical content downplays controversial episodes in the FBI's past - intelligence failures, accusations of illegality, and the like - and emphasises success stories. A cursory comparison of the site's version with more independent academic scholarship is enough to confirm this. For instance, the FBI's failure to act on information that Pearl Harbour was to be bombed -  which is even noted in the work of Johnson, a National Security adviser - does not make an appearance on the FBI History Timeline. A general attempt to whitewash aspects of J. Edgar Hoover's tenure is also glaringly apparent. At times this runs the risk of parody. Rather than acknowledge that Cold War era pursuit of 'radicals' was often misguided, the Postwar History page elects to wholeheartedly support the institutional line taken by the Bureau thirty years previously. "Through Hoover's speeches, articles, testimony, and books like Masters of Deceit, the FBI helped alert the public to the Communist threat." The approach seems eerily anachronistic, and hardly destined to inspire public confidence. 

Given the size and nature of this site, a large part of its purpose must be seen as an attempt to create a self-contained and totalizing perspective on the FBI. There is no encouragement of dialogue or debate here; instead there is a one-way flow of information from the Bureau to the public. This is in line with Rosensweig: 

"In general, there seem to be two impulses - whether conscious or unconscious - at war on the Web. One considers a site merely a piece of a larger network of information that the site's creators do not control .. Tho other strategy - particularly strong for some institutions and for commercial operations - is more proprietary and attempts to capture the attention of the Web browser for its particular site."

Usefulness

Despite the attempt to create a totalizing perspective, I would contend that we use this site in ways that do not conform to this perspective. We can harness the information the site provides to construct our own, more critically aware understanding of the FBI. In order to do this, it is useful to approach  it from a historically informed position - if this is the case, we can explore the site's very elisions and absences to develop our understanding of the FBI's  history. 

For instance, looking at the page Directors - Then and Now   we can see that in the sixteen years leading up to Hoover's appointment, the nascent FBI had five directors. Hoover forty-eight year reign is of course unprecedented. And in the twenty years since his death in 1972, the FBI has had no less than ten directors, including the current one, and five of these have been 'Acting Directors.' This evidence speaks volumes of a political program to limit the FBI's executive power by ensuring regular changes of leadership. We can confirm this by looking at the FBI timeline, where we find out that in 1968, Congress enacted Public Law 90351 providing for the appointment of the FBI Director by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate to a 10 year term. The act was to take effect after Director Hoover's tenure.

More contemporary information provided on the site can also be compared with other online materials to develop an institutional critique of FBI methodology and ideology, and how these have changed. For example, The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective might provide an interesting comparison with The Mafia Monograph from the FOIA site in examining the ways the FBI constructs  (or, if you prefer, assesses ) threats to the American nation. There are many other possible 'alternative readings' of material available on this site. 

Once again, the FBI Home Page represents a source of historical information which is manifestly slanted and thus, in part, historically unreliable. However, like the FOIA site, it also provides information that the historian can read in more complex ways than were perhaps intended by its designers. And its design and content, intended to endorse and propagate the institution's viewpoint,  provide us with a valuable source for interrogating that viewpoint. 

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