Josh Wieder

The vile letter above speaks for itself. The letter you see above, published for the first time fully unredacted by the New York Times yesterday , was sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King Jr, in order to compel him to commit suicide. The letter was apparently enclosed with a recording that the FBI believed could provide King was cheating on his wife; the impetus for their suicide demand. The sections that have for decades remained redacted explicitly reference the tape - it becomes apparent that the only possible reason for censoring this material is that it contains proof that the FBI was conducting warrantless surveillance of US citizens for purely political reasons. Fortunately we live in an enlightened age where such warrantless eavesdropping is merely a curio of the distant past. Oh, wait ...

As more of day to day life and communications takes place on IP based networks, and as the regulation  surrounding that convergence removes barriers to owners of those networks providing information gleaned from those communications to third parties (including the State) without fear of tort or criminal  reprisal, it becomes more and more clear that tomorrow's world is one with much less privacy than that envisioned during, say, the writing of the Federalist Papers. The New York Times just published a discussion on the topic that is worth perusing (even if you are not particularly a fan of the Times).