Thursday, July 17, 2014

GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE - Before eMail or Edward Snowden

"How an unlikely group changed the face of the FBI, retold in ‘The Burglary’" PBS NewsHour 7/15/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Next, a look back at a different era of government surveillance, well before e-mail or Edward Snowden.

Jeffrey Brown has our book conversation.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  On March 8, 1971, a group of burglars entered a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.  In the files they took away, they found evidence of wide-scale surveillance of U.S. citizens, particularly of anti-war and black civil rights activists.

It opened a window on the FBI that eventually led to the downfall of its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, and to major reforms of the bureau.  The perpetrators were never caught, but their identities and story are now told in the new book “The Burglary.”

Author Betty Medsger was one of the original journalists to receive and publish the information that came from the stolen files and she joins us now.

And welcome to you.

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