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The New York Times has a fascinating story today that says a lot about why the whole debate over what the NSA has been up to should not be wholly concerned about one's opinion of Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, and why any argument in support of any intelligence agency that is based on that agency's ability to police itself, or based on the efficacy of congressional oversight, is a fairy tale to keep the children quiet at night.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups. The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover's lengthy tenure as director. "When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it," said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. "There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting."

These guys were criminals, just as Snowden is accused of being. The activities they exposed were criminal, just as some of what Snowden exposed was, and just as lying to Congress is. I guess you would have to argue that, instead of keeping their secret for 42 years, they should have "come forward" and "availed themselves of the Constitution" and "trusted the system" that it wouldn't have sent them to Leavenworth for 40 years. But the real point is a simpler one -- left to their own devices, spy agencies will spy, and they will shred the Constitution and the laws if they have to, and the very secrecy they demand acts as a accelerant to delusions of messianic grandeur. The threat is always existential and the spies always the last line of defense, and the people always delicate flowers who need not know what is being done in their name to protect them from harm. Democracy is infantilized.

After packing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.'s spying on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.

But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.'s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro. Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro - shorthand for Counterintelligence Program - were revealed. Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide. "It wasn't just spying on Americans," said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. "The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations."

All of this was done with the best of intentions, I assure you. The good Catholic Feebs from St. John's and from Fordham who engaged in these crimes believed they were doing god's work. They were Saving The Country. No, the burglars from Media didn't go to Russia, and they didn't send out Christmas messages to the world. But what they were fighting against never changes. Only technology does.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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