Your every move is being watched. Scary thought, right? A thought we like to associate with Orwellian sci-fi or Alex Jones, but in recent years we've seen this idea become a reality. Little black boxes with blinking red lights are at traffic spots, street corners or up in trees making sure you're not up to any funny business. Now, in a democracy sans Habeas Corpus, we would expect our every move to be watched—in fact, we'd be surprised if the government didn't just listen to the conversation we just had about going to see High for the Holidays later. And it's definitely not a new concept in the American train of thought: the University of Texas students of the Sixties were dealing with every day.

Lee Hamilton was the Chief of Police for UTPD during the 1960s until 1970, an unstable time for young America (the 1966 murders by Charles Whitman happened during his tenure) and a time when paranoia and civil unrest were constants. The Texas Observer released, almost two months ago, the once-private documents of Chief Hamilton, compiled from 1963 to 1970, that "tell the story of how the University of Texas spied on its noncomformist and dissident students. The records... show the extensive efforts that campus police made to identify, watch, and follow students and faculty members whom it found suspicious."

The University of Texas were spying on their students, with the help of the Austin Police Department. They took surveillence photos—over 250 in total— and photocopied leaflets and flyers, including those containing names and signatures taken from petitions or sign-in sheets collected at meetings and rallies. UTPD also compiled lists of of campus "dopers" and activists, which included Janis Joplin, Jerry Jeff Walker, Lloyd Doggett and Kinky Friedman. The university even went as far as to recruite the treasurer of the local Students for a Democratic Society, Jeff Gardner, and Daily Texan editor John Economidy to act as informants.

Economidy wrote to Hamilton, "Here is the list of persons which I promised you. I'll get you the negatives of the shots I took Tuesday at the latest." The Observer contacted Economidy recently, where he said, "as a journalist, it definitely was not appropriate." The Students for a Democratic Society were the focal point of many of the investigations; SDS was the "heart of the antiwar and New Left movement in Austin and throughout the country." Students at the university were monitored closer than just by their names and numbers: race ("Vicky Kirk is a 'colored female'"), sexuality (one student was described as being "very sexually promiscuous and believed to have nymphomaniac tendencies") and even facial hair ("Gary Chason is 'growing a beard'") were all taken into consideration.

Two "rebel presses" were under the microscope: The Texas Ranger, a Texas Travesty precursor that featured art and literature of the left-leaning persuasion, and The Rag, the university's first underground press. The latter was highly investigated, to the point, in fact, that they sued the authorities. Their case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the paper's free speech rights were upheld.

A wooden Army barracks on the 2800 block of Nueces on the campus west side was the focal point of the student counterculture, and a starting point for social currents branching outwards. Dubbed the "Ghetto," it was a place where the liberal runts "[floated] from place to place" and where the students engaged in "wild parties." Police Chief Hamilton once referred to it as "a haven for Jews."

What was the reason? Some point to former Chairman of the UT Board of Regents and Democratic Party confidant Frank Erwin as the main reason for the intensity of investigations of the UT student body. Former SDS leader Alice Embree explained to The Observer, "UT police had such a close relationship with other agencies—DPS, FBI, the Secret Service—because of the presidential spotlight. There we were in the streets, protesting Lyndon's war and trying to integrate the dorm where his daughter lived."

Check out the entire archive online courtesy of The Texas Observer.

Top photo courtesy of Banksy.