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Since the 1930s the ADL has been gathering information and publishing reports on whatever it identifies as anti-Semitism, racism and prejudice, and on anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, racist, anti-democratic, violent, and extremist individuals and groups. As a result, the organization amassed what it once called a "famous storehouse of accurate, detailed, unassailable information on extremist individuals and organizations." Over the decades the ADL has assembled thousands of files.

Background: surveillance and Bullock
One of its sources for the 1980s and 1990s was Roy Bullock, an intelligence gatherer for the South African apartheid regime, a private collector of information. He amassed files on 10,000-12,000 individuals and 600 organizations and provided them to the ADL as a secretly paid independent contractor for over 32 years. Bullock often wrote letters to various groups and forwarded copies of their replies to the ADL, clipped articles from newspapers and magazines, and maintained files on his computer. He also used less orthodox, and possibly illegal, methods such as combing through trash and tapping into White Aryan Resistance's phone message system in order to find evidence of hate crimes. Some of the information he obtained and then passed on to the ADL came from confidential documents (including intelligence files on various Nazi groups and driver's license records and other personal information on nearly 1,400 people) that were given to him by San Francisco police officer Tom Gerard.

The ADL employed Bullock at least as early as the 1980s, at which time he and others spied on the movement against South African apartheid, passing reports to the South African government at the same time. The San Francisco district attorney later accused the ADL of selling this information to the regime.

News Coverage
In January 1993, San Fransisco newspapers released stories describing how this ADL surveillance targeted anti-apartheid and pro-Gazan protest groups, among others. This coverage led to coverage in The Village Voice of how Bullock had compiled files on nearly a thousand political groups and 10,000 individuals. This coverage led groups and individuals to enter a lawsuit against the ADL.

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On April 8, 1993, police seized Bullock's computer and raided the ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. A search of Bullock's computer revealed that he had compiled files on 9,876 individuals and more than 950 groups across the political spectrum. Many of Bullock's files concerned groups that did not fit the mold of extremist groups, hate groups, and organizations hostile to Jews or Israel that the ADL would usually be interested in. Along with files on the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance, Islamic Jihad and the Jewish Defense League were data on the NAACP, the African National Congress (ANC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the United Auto Workers, the AIDS activist group ACT UP, Mother Jones magazine, the TASS Soviet/Russian news agency, Greenpeace, Jews for Jesus and the National Lawyers Guild; there were also files on politicians including Democratic U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, former Republican U.S. Representative Pete McCloskey, and activist Lyndon LaRouche. Bullock told investigators that many of those were his own private files, not information he was passing on to the ADL. An attorney for the ADL stated that "We knew nothing about the vast extent of the files. Those are not ADL's files. … That is all [Bullock's] doing." As for its own records, the ADL indicated that just because it had a file on a group, that did not mean that the ADL opposed the group. The San Francisco district attorney at the time accused the ADL of conducting a national "spy network," but dropped all accusations a few months later, judging it to be a force for good. The ADL then offered the district attorney's office a sum of $75,000 to fight bigotry, which was duly accepted.

In the weeks following the raids, twelve civil rights groups led by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the National Lawyers Guild, filed a lawsuit demanding that the ADL release its surveillance information and end its investigations, as well as ordering it to pay punitive damages. The plaintiffs' attorney, former Representative McCloskey, claimed that the information the ADL gathered constituted an invasion of privacy. The ADL, while distancing itself from Bullock, countered that it is entitled like any researcher or journalist to research organizations and individuals. Richard Cohen, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, stated that like journalists, the ADL's researchers "gather information however they can" and welcome disclosures from confidential sources, saying "they probably rely on their sources to draw the line" on how much can legally be divulged. Bullock admitted that he was overzealous, and that some of the ways in which he gathered information may have been illegal.

The lawsuit was settled out of court in 1996. The ADL agreed to pay $175,000 for the court costs of the groups, two of them Jewish, that sued it, promised that it would not seek information from sources it knew could not legally disclose such information, consented to remove sensitive information like criminal records or Social Security numbers from its files, and spent $25,000 in order to further relations between the Jewish, Arab and black communities. When the case was settled, Hussein Ibish, director of communications for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), claimed that the ADL had gathered data "systematically in a program whose clear intent was to undermine civil rights and Arab-American organizations." ADL national director Abraham Foxman called the ADC's claims "absolutely untrue," saying that "if it were true, they would have won their case" and noted that no court found the ADL guilty of any wrongdoing. The ADL released a statement saying that the settlement "explicitly recognizes ADL's right to gather information in any lawful and constitutionally protected manner, which we have always done and will continue to do." John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue that the organization, rather than defending Jews from bigotry, was targeting individuals critical of Israel or of U.S. support for Israel.

James Rosenberg
A case which has been compared to the Bullock case was that of James Mitchell Rosenberg, aka Jim Anderson. Rosenberg/Anderson was an undercover operative of the ADL who acted as an agent provocateur, posing as a racist right-wing paramilitary extremist. He appeared in this role as part of a TV documentary entitled Armies of the Right which premiered in 1981. Rosenberg was arrested that same year in New York for carrying an unregistered firearm in public view. In 1984, ADL fact-finding director Irwin Suall identified Rosenberg as an ADL operative in a court deposition.