A footnote to J.D. Tuccille's item earlier today about the activists who in 1971 broke into an FBI office, lifted a lot of files, and used them to expose COINTELPO, a program devoted to surveilling, infiltrating, and disrupting political groups. If you're at all interested in this chapter in the history of government abuses, you should spend some time exploring those old COINTELPRO files, which the government has now posted online. I spent a lot of time reading them when I was writing The United States of Paranoia, and they're filled with schemes that are alternately frightening, stupid, and simply bizarre.