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Welcome to Leg and the second episode in our series about Jay Edgar Hoover.

The man who shaped the modern FBI, and it's no exaggeration to say, laid the foundations

for so much of today's political landscape, not just in America, but beyond as well.

Hoover's on the course to become one of the most important figures in American politics of the whole of the 20th century,

but we've left him in 2024. He's just 30 years old, but he's already been made acting head of the Bureau of Investigation, as it was known

at that time. And this is a big opportunity for Young Hoover. It's only a few years since the end of

the First World War, but fears about the threat of communism are bubbling and pervasive. And he has

the chance to build the Bureau into a monument to law and order.

But at the same time, Afwa, you know, there's new technologies.

Today it's all about smartphones, but telegraph wires and people being able to talk on the phone

means that if you can tap their conversations, you can gain a lot of information very quickly.

So one of the questions is, under what circumstances, is it okay for the government to listen

into phone calls?

And that's a important legal question, isn't it, to be able to ask who should have a court order

to allow which kinds of conversations to be listened to? That's a struggle for the Justice Department

to understand, too. And this is something we deal with so much at the moment that new technology

offers so much potential for abuse of power and for an invasion

of people's privacy. And this is the exact issue that was beginning to divide Americans in the

...