This is

This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 16th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

This month marks 50 years since a group of seemingly average people

executed a remarkable break-in at the FBI.

And in the process of committing that felony, exposed far greater felonies committed by our federal government.

Cato's Patrick Edington discusses the anniversary.

You make note of a piece recently saying,

Happy FBI burglary day. This was celebrating the Citizens Commission to investigate the

FBI. So what did these people, what was these people's problem with the FBI

exactly? Could have been anything, but what was it?

Well, pretty much the same problem that we have today,

unfortunately.

I think that's a very, very fair statement.

Yeah, these were a group of folks who lived in the Philadelphia area in the late 60s, and I think actually some of them still live in that area, but they became part of the anti-war movement.

The leader of the group, Professor William Dabedon, a physicist

at Haverford College, had gotten involved in the anti-nuclear movement in the 1960s.

And that's how he came, one of the ways that he came to the

attention of the FBI as we now know. But by the late 1960s and into early 1970 he was

hearing from an awful lot of friends in the anti-war movement

that they were convinced that Jagger Hoover's agents were actively working to undermine

the anti-war movement infiltrating organizations and so on and so forth.

And to his credit, Bill Davidon took a very scientific approach to this.

...