COINTELPRO: Paranoia with a Budget (Full Series)
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COINTELPRO: Paranoia with a Budget (Full Series)
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About this listen
These chapters appear as originally published, with their original structure intact. This compilation is provided for listeners who prefer to follow the full arc in one sitting, without release gaps.
COINTELPRO wasn’t about surveillance.It was about disruption.
Across four chapters, we trace how the FBI built a domestic playbook of “neutralization”, using informants, psychological operations, forged letters, internal sabotage, and pressure campaigns that moved far beyond traditional law enforcement.
The program began under the justification of COINTELPRO — White Hate, targeting violent extremist groups. But the methods didn’t remain limited to those targets. What started as an exception became a precedent.
The same tactics were redirected toward civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, student movements, and political organizations—until “disruption” became a standing permission slip.
This compilation follows the full trajectory: from infiltration and psychological warfare, to escalation against lawful dissent, to the moment COINTELPRO stopped being deniable and became documented...exposed by a burglary in Media, Pennsylvania, forced into daylight through FOIA litigation, and confronted by the Church Committee’s investigation.
It also tracks the modern afterlife of the logic: new authorities, new language, and a surveillance ecosystem where investigations can begin without a criminal predicate, and disruption doesn’t always look like disruption until it’s too late.
This series isn’t asking whether the first targets were “bad.”
It’s asking what happens once a government decides it can violate its own laws to stop them.
Once that line is crossed, the definition of “bad” never stays fixed.
IN THIS EPISODE:
- Origins: How COINTELPRO emerged as a domestic “neutralization” program
- White Hate: Infiltration, informants, and the “Good Lie” justification
- Disruption: Psychological warfare tactics deployed without warrants
- Escalation: The expansion to civil rights leaders, students, anti-war movements, and political organizations
- Exposure: The Media, Pennsylvania break-in, FOIA disclosures, and the Church Committee
- Afterlife: Guidelines, “assessments,” expanded domestic authority, and modern surveillance ecosystems
- U.S. Senate (Church Committee), Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (Book II)
- FBI COINTELPRO directives and memoranda (declassified / FOIA releases via FBI Vault)
- DOJ, Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations (2008)
- FBI, Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) (selected sections)
- DOJ OIG reporting on post-Watergate guideline history (Levi / 1976) and related oversight
- ACLU reporting on FBI “assessments” and domestic intelligence practices
- Documented reporting on social-media monitoring tools and related civil liberties cases
- ACLU / Statewatch materials on JTRIG “effects” capabilities and documented techniques
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