FBI Office Burglary: Exposing COINTELPRO
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
On March eighth, nineteen seventy-one, a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the bureau's local office in Media, Pennsylvania, and walked out with more than a thousand documents. What they found inside was explosive: documented proof of COINTELPRO, the FBI's secret Counterintelligence Program, which had been used to infiltrate, harass, and disrupt civil rights groups, antiwar organizations, and other domestic political movements. The activists mailed selected documents to newspapers.
The exposure proved significant. It led, in part, to the United States Senate's Church Committee investigation, which in nineteen seventy-five concluded that the FBI had systematically violated civil liberties. The Church Committee's work led to a permanent Senate committee on intelligence, changing how surveillance power in America is checked.
