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Comment by LarryDarrell | Hacker News Reader

I can't even imagine how muted the Civil Rights era would have been had the FBI had this power back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

Let's not pretend that things are materially worse than they were back then. We certainly aren't blackmailing civil rights leaders into suicide anymore within the FBI.

No. We just try to jail them or their children. E.g. Michael Flynn.

You're being downvoted. Can you please explain what you mean, how it relates and link to sources?

How do we know they aren't?

King letter only came to light because citizens stole it from an FBI office. Maybe the FBI just has tighter security now.

Ding-ding-ding.

That's actually not true, and that's a really big assumption to make without evidence or direct experience.

Radical activists today still face state suppression. I know of a communist in Austin who had an FBI file because he led lots of actions, which (I think) he discovered through FOIA requests. In 2018, the Austin PD colluded with two people who claimed this guy assaulted them while he was armed, which was completely false. He's in prison now.

You don't even need to imagine it, that's the reality we are living in right now.

Seriously. The FBI was watching Black Lives Matter activists for a while as “black identity extremists.” For merely saying “black lives matter” in the street.

Similar things were happening during the Civil Rights era.

During the Civil Rights era things were pretty terrible.

I don't know how you measure the two but I think your vague implication here is pretty wrong / represents a real misunderstanding of what the government was up to in the civil rights era...

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