This is really like the worst sins of the American government's activities in the period of the Cold War.

Everything from the attempted harassment, surveillance of Martin Luther King,

to the assassination plots against Fidel Castro, to the CIA's extraordinary record of

drug testing on non-volunteer human subjects.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Michael Feinberg, senior editor at Lawfare, here today with

Matthew Gwarlia and Brian Hockman.

Any political movement you've seen of the last 50 years since the Church

Pity Report have had some variation, maybe not as illegal and as violent as under the

Church Committee report, and oftentimes a lot of this burden has been shouldered by local police and maybe

not the federal government, but to some extent the playbook for how to disrupt a political

movement is still very much relevant and still very much readable in the Church Committee

Report.

Today we're talking about their recently published edition of the Church Committee Report, containing revelations from the bombshell 1970s investigation into the national security state.

Before we get too deep into what the Church Committee found and what we can learn from it,

I was wondering if you two, in whatever order you choose,

would sort of tell our listeners about how you came to write this book.

So Ryan and I are both scholars who have been interested in the history of surveillance

and policing more broadly. So I was actually a reporter

during the 2013 NSA revelations. And it was there that I kind of encountered the church committee

for the first time and started combing through book two about surveillance on American citizens and got really interested in it,

and always kind of kept it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something about the Church Committee report.

Fast forward to 2019, I started working at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

...