When the U.S. government illegally spied on Martin Luther King, Jr.

When the state can categorize you as being part of a group it considers a threat, real or imagined, that’s all the justification the government needs to ignore your constitutional rights.@jackhunter74 for BASEDPolitics:https://t.co/eJj8TYs3z9

— Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) February 7, 2022

Government officials once said that National Security Agency surveillance in no way collected the private data of American citizens. Thanks to Edward Snowden, in 2013 we learned that the U.S. government was collecting everyone’s information en masse. Government promised that the 2001 Patriot Act (passed after 9/11) would only be used to target Islamic terrorists. Today, it is used more to fight the war on drugs and other criminal activities that have little to no connection to terrorism.

In 2018, the FBI finally admitted it had spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Just this week, a new report showed that the NSA was still spying on all of us with few to no restrictions.

This kind of abuse is nothing new. In the mid-20th century, the NSA and FBI would spy without a warrant on suspected “domestic enemies” of the U.S.

Among those 'enemies?' Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, as we celebrate Black History Month, there was a time when the most cherished hero of the 1960s civil rights struggle was viewed by our government not as a champion of racial equality but the 'most dangerous Negro of the future of this nation,' as the FBI called him."

Read the entire column.