A handful of ordinary folks -- teachers, students, and young parents among them -- heartsick at the escalating war despite mounting popular resistance to it, alarmed that government surveillance was spiraling out of control, having tried all sorts of peaceful protest and seeing no other way to effect change, decided to break into an FBI office.
Their hope: to expose the bureau's political spying by collecting actual records, thereby allowing the U.S. public to see and judge for themselves.
It worked. And despite the fact that they were about the most wanted people in the country by the FBI, with hundreds of agents hunting them, they kept their identities secret for more than four decades.
This is their story.
The screening will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 7:00 p.m. in Textor 103. It will be followed by a Q&A with Jeff Cohen, director of the Park Center for Independent Media and associate professor of journalism, who has written about FBI and NSA abuses and mainstream media failures to cover them.
Note: The following week, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 7:00 p.m. in Williams 225, PCIM will host a talk by Betty Medsger, who was one of the first journalists to receive the purloined documents and who continued to cover the story for years. Her 2014 book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, finally revealed the identities of some of the citizen burglars.
Free and open. Individuals requiring accommodation, please contact Brandy Hawley, bhawley@ithaca.edu; 607-274-3590.
Visit the Events Calendar fore more information.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20140918152928641