Much of this was known before, including the FBI's anonymous letter attempting to provoke a suicide. As others said elsewhere in this thread, documents came out during the Church Committee. I wrote this 15 years ago when I worked at Time:
The FBI's campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther
King began in December 1963, soon after the
famous civil rights March on Washington. It
started with an extensive -- and illegal -- electronic
surveillance of King that probed into every corner
of his personal life.
Two weeks after the march, the same week King
appeared on the cover of Time magazine as "Man
of the Year," FBI agents inserted a microphone in
King's bedroom. ("They had to dig deep in the
garbage to come up with that one," FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover said of the Time cover story.) Hoover
wiretapped King's phone and fed the information to
the Defense Department and to friendly
newspapermen.
When King travelled to Europe to receive the
Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover tried to derail meetings
between King and foreign officials, including the
Pope. Hoover even sent King an anonymous
letter, using information gathered through illegal
surveillance, to encourage the depressed civil
rights leader to commit suicide.
"The actions taken against Dr. King are
indefensible. They represent a sad episode in the
dark history of covert actions directed against
law-abiding citizens by a law enforcement
agency," a Senate committee concluded in 1976.
[…]
History reveals that time and again, the FBI,
the military and other law enforcement
organizations have ignored the law and spied on
Americans illegally, without court authorization.
Government agencies have subjected hundreds of
thousands of law-abiding Americans to unjust
surveillance, illegal wiretaps and warrantless
searches. Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King
Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic
priests were spied on. The FBI used secret files
and hidden microphones to blackmail the
Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and
influence presidential elections.
Shame we never had any Church committee after the Snowden revelations. Where are all the NSA "reforms" now? They even have the nerve to say that the "pendulum has swung too far" in favor of privacy, when absolutely nothing has changed in the form of law since then.
Yep. It's been ~18 months since we first heard of Edward Snowden, and there have been no significant policy (as in, presidential executive order) or legal changes to NSA surveillance authority.
I don't know why there's no modern-day Church committee, but here are a few hypotheses:
1. Sen. Church was running the investigation circa 1975, a few years after Watergate was exposed and a year after Nixon resigned. I suspect there was much more public concern about executive abuses than there are today, and the GOP's willingness to defend the Nixon administration was limited post-Waterage (compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D in the White House).
2. Much of FedGov's surveillance abuses pre-Church were clearly illegal and criminal. The lesson intelligence agencies learned is that, no matter how dodgy the behavior, as long as there's an AG opinion theoretically blessing it, you won't be prosecuted. So the surveillance abuses today may violate the 4A and our sense of proportionality, but they aren't clearly indictable offenses. Instead of "clearly illegal" you have "AG blessed in a written opinion and lawyers may disagree."
3. There was no Intelligence Committee back then, so TLAs were more limited in being able to get congressional buy-in for warrantless surveillance. Now there is, and Feinstein (and Rs on it as well, to be sure) have been the biggest defenders of the NSA post-Snowden. They have to be: they were read in on the programs and were complicit in any wrongdoing. Answer: argue there was none!
4. Forty years after the Church Committee, people now may expect to be under surveillance (sadly) and expect FedGov to be corrupt. Look at post-1970s movies like Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, V for Vendetta, etc. So what would have shocked the average American's conscience 40 years ago may now be almost expected. (This is the boiling-frog theory.)
5. There's a lot more inflation-adjusted $$$ to be made from the surveillance-industrial complex now especially post-9/11 than there was 40+ years ago. It may be an order of magnitude higher. More tax $$$ kicking around == more support in Washington officialdom.
I'm sure there are other explanations too but those are the first that come to mind...
> (compare to now, where nearly all Dem politicos will defend to the hilt a D in the White House).
While the sitting POTUS is in fact a Democrat, a lot of the revelations presented by Snowden (and the AG opinions blessing the illegal spying (and torture, etc)) where initiated under a Republican POTUS and for most of his tenure a Republican majority in Congress. And while we didn't have solid evidence before Snowden, it was fairly common knowledge that rights were being infringed upon in the guise of security (and ironically 'protecting our freedoms'). And I cannot really recall a GOP member being outraged about this then or now.
Regardless, both parties have been pretty absent in this debacle and typically, when a congress-person steps out from the herd and starts to question the legitimacy of it all, they typically get displaced in the next election.
This is the rule: Party X will defend unconstitutional electronic surveillance when the president is Party X. And it will attack unconstitutional electronic surveillance when the president is NOT(Party X).
Well, maybe there is a committee. But for national security reasons, it would obviously have to work in secret, and it's findings would be secret. Can you prove that there haven't been a classified audit of the NSA, in accordance with the classified rules that were enacted to enable such a classified audit?
It's part of the series about sedentary detective Nero Wolfe, one of my literary guilty pleasures. While being all for law and order, Stout was not too keen on unbridled authority, and his characters would often tweak a policeman's metaphorical nose.
