Portside

How the Espionage Act of 1917 is the most important yet least understood law threatening freedom of the press in modern American history.

Going back more than 20 years, FISA court rulings have complained of FBI agents lying to the court and abusing the law. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment.

"The FBI's systematic misuse of these resources proves that it (and the rest of the federal government) simply can't be trusted to wield this sort of power," said one campaigner. "Let 702 die."

Reader Comments: Derailment = Nationalization; Florida Bans Black History; Syria Hit by Earthquake, too; FBI Still Uses Informants; Amazon Labor Union; Charlene Mitchell; Communists in Closets; Building Resilient Organizations; Cartoons; more...

Florida's war on woke, and more nightmares from the Sunshine State

Exclusive: retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley calls for clemency for Indigenous activist who has been in prison for nearly 50 years

Left out of GOP debates about “the weaponization” of the federal government is the use of the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders for most of the 20th century. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the targets.

Reader Comments: Elections- Economy, Race, Racism; Supreme Court, Democracy; Fascist Threat; Climate Change; Labor Upsurge; Transatlantic Left Dialogue and Internationalism in Our Time-this weekend; International Women's Conference-call papers; more

Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.