Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive 214-page report documenting that many high-profile FBI terrorism prosecutions were “an illusion” based on aggressive sting operations that entrapped vulnerable individuals who posed no genuine threat. The report analyzed decades of terrorism …
FBI field offices around the country began surveilling Occupy Wall Street organizers as early as August 2011—a month before the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti Park—treating the nonviolent economic justice movement as a potential terrorist threat despite acknowledging internally that organizers …
FBI agents executed coordinated early-morning raids on the homes and offices of anti-war and international solidarity activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities, seizing computers, phones, documents, and political materials. The raids targeted activists organizing against the Iraq and …
Four men from Newburgh, New York—James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—were arrested in an FBI sting operation in which a paid government informant conceived the plot, provided all the means, and coerced economically desperate men into participating. A federal judge …
A Department of Justice Inspector General audit revealed that the FBI’s terrorist watchlist contained approximately 35% errors, with large portions of the list governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records. The report exposed systematic failures in a watchlist system that …
The FBI ordered informant Craig Monteilh to infiltrate multiple large mosques in Orange County, California, in a dragnet surveillance operation that targeted entire Muslim communities rather than specific suspects. The operation exemplified the FBI’s post-9/11 practice of religious profiling …
The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents that exposed COINTELPRO—the FBI’s covert and illegal program to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt American civil rights organizations and political …
On December 4, 1969, at 4:45 a.m., fourteen Chicago police officers raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Police fired between 82 and 99 shots into the apartment; the Panthers fired at most one. Hampton was shot twice in the head at …
On August 25, 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized the expansion of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to create a new initiative targeting “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups.” This program represented a systematic effort by the nation’s premier law enforcement …
On October 10, 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy signed an authorization permitting the FBI to wiretap the telephones of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference offices in New York and Atlanta. The authorization, requested by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, …
On August 28, 1956, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover formally established COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), a covert and illegal program designed to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt domestic political organizations. Initially targeting the Communist Party USA, the program would …