Review: Church Committee Report on Illegal Spying Is Relevant Again in the Trump Era

It’s not a good sign when a 50-year-old Senate committee report on illegal government activities is relevant and timely enough for a new release. The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State has, alas, arrived at the right political moment. This new, abridged version of the infamous 1976 report appears as the Trump administration pursues retaliatory investigations into political opponents and so-called domestic terrorists.

The committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D–Idaho), was formed after Watergate to answer basic questions about domestic surveillance: Who was the government spying on? How was it spying? What was it doing with the information? And was it following the law?

“The answer to each of these questions is disturbing,” the report concluded. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”

The report aired some of the FBI and CIA’s dirtiest laundry, including illegal wiretapping, unethical medical experiments, and covert programs to disrupt lawful political organizing. As the editors of this new edition—the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Matthew Guariglia and Georgetown’s Brian Hochman—write in their preface, “No government document has done more to expose the mechanisms behind America’s aspirations of political supremacy in the twentieth century.”

Guariglia and Hochman have stripped the 3,100-page report down to its core revelations, along with case studies on such scandals as the FBI’s blackmail operation against Martin Luther King Jr. This new edition will be an eye-opener for anyone who’s not paranoid enough yet.