Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, the Pentagon Papersâit seems like Americans get a chance to peek behind the surveillance curtain only when somebody commits a crime. That precedent was arguably set on the evening of March 8, 1971, during the âfight of the centuryâ between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, when activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every file they could find.
As the activists sorted through documents to mail to journalists, even they were shocked to find that more than half were dedicated to spying on activists and undermining draft resistance. (An estimated 1 percent of the FBI files were about organized crime.)
It was the publicâs first taste of a surveillance state that has become depressingly familiar. The FBI never figured out who was behind the break-in, but some of the burglars came forward in 2014. This plain but very informative documentary fills out the details of who they were (mostly college types, including a physics professor), what they did, and what happened afterwardâincluding the revelation of J. Edgar Hooverâs COINTELPRO campaign to âdisrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize, or otherwise eliminateâ political movements and their supporters.
As Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., chief counsel of the Church Committeeâa Senate investigation into state surveillanceâconcludes toward the end of the film: âA government program of secrecy and no oversight is bound to have mission creep and go from the wrong but understandable to the horrible and un-understandable.â We just donât learn, do we?