Hey Mom! Guess what? They ARE out to get us!

According to journalist Betty Medsger, the burglars who carted off files from the Media, Pa., FBI office in 1971 encountered an internal FBI document that urged agents monitoring anti-war and civil rights activists to "enhance [their] paranoia" by getting the "point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

Medsger adds that Susan Smith, one of the burglars, said she realized the document, once it became public, would vindicate many people who had been ridiculed for suspecting the FBI was spying on them; they would want to say, "Hey Mom, everybody, I'm not mentally ill! They really are after me, you, lots of people."

It must be understood that the great majority of activists were nonviolent and went no further than acts of open civil disobedience at protest events, though some nonviolent activists had been burglarizing draft boards to try to impede their operation. Still, it was shocking to many that the FBI would advocate use of such "paranoia" tactics against ALL activists.

The effect of Congressional reforms of the 1970s was at best temporary. This is because the CIA had also been engaging in "countermeasures" against domestic critics, especially the more effective ones, though its unethical activities tended to be written off as covert war against Soviet agents. The CIA conveys the fiction that it does not operate domestically, but the exceptions to that policy are big enough to drive a very large truck through -- in fact, quite a few convoys through.

Sy Hersh's 1974 bombshell on massive domestic spying
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/238963/huge-c-i-a-operation-reported-in-u-s-against.pdf

Supposedly, the Church committee fixed all that. Reality: CIA contemptuously ignored controls. Journalists were among those under surveillance by spooks.