Last month Professor Joshua Clark Daniels excavated a forgotten story from the files of the FBI: the Bureau’s surveillance of black-owned bookstores from 1968 to 1974. Spying on bookstores might seem quaint in the the age of mass surveillance but there is a connection: how U.S. intelligence agencies see and understand their most vocal and...
Tag: FBI
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How a High School Class Penetrated the Veil of Secrecy and Forgetting
A group of high school student from Highstown, New Jersey did something fairly amazing this year: They took effective action against government secrecy. They wrote a law, and, in a bitterly divided Congress, they got it passed. And President Trump signed it. The students in Stu Wexler’s American government class, persuaded Congress to preserve and...
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Leaked FBI Testimony Doesn’t Bolster Trump’s ‘Deep State’ Theories
With Democrats now in control of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, new details are emerging about the Republican investigation of the FBI’s handling of the investigation of presidential candidate Donald Trump. Two transcripts, leaked to the New York Times and the Epoch Times respectively, show how senior FBI officials viewed Donald Trump’s rise...
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Time to Lay to Rest Those JFK Conspiracy Theories About George Bush
As editor of the JFK Facts blog, I often heard the theory that the late President Bush was somehow complicit in JFK’s death. In the comments section of site, it was a hardy perennial. Exactly how Bush was involved was rarely explained. To me it seemed that JFK conspiracy theories about Bush persisted mainly as a way...
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Who Is Watching the Watchers?
That perennial question in the Age of Surveillance was projected by visual artist provocateur Robin Bell on a most appropriate canvas: the headquarters of the FBI in downtown Washington.