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And that was before the FBI had NSA's data on US citizens. The FBI's version of X-Keyscore has a different name.

It's obvious these sorts of programs are still ongoing. Probably all that really came out of the Congressional inquiries in the 1970s was the development of better methods to keep them hidden from the public.

We only know about COINTELPRO because some mysterious group of activists stole a bunch of the records from an FBI field office in Pennsylvania!

They aren't mysterious anymore, six members of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI revealed themselves a few years ago.

TIL! Kinda surprising none of them suffered any repercussions but I suppose enough time had passed it wasn't considered worth drawing attention to it.

They were all retired IIRC & they waited until the statute of limitations for those crimes had passed before revealing themselves. So it would have been difficult for the government to meaningfully retaliate without making significant changes to the legal system & it's not exactly an episode that the government wanted to draw attention to.

I suppose they could have gone for extra-legal methods, but after so much time the people with the motivation to make that happen (if it was possible at all) would have mostly retired too.

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