Stay in Line, We're Your Government. Don't Make Trouble.

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"We're your government. We know what's best. Don't make trouble," Hoover told a group of young men in the early 1980s. "If you don't stay in line, in whatever realm that might be, we're going we're going to try to stop you," he warned them. The FBI had files on almost every writer and artist from James Baldwin to ray bradbury; many are now public.

In 1971, a woman visited an F.B.I. office in Pennsylvania. She identified herself as a college student interested in learning about opportunities for women in the F.B.I. None of that was true. She was there “to see whether there were security alarms before we could decide if we could break in.”

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