A presentation from Homeland Security on Intelligence Oversight Training appears to include a version of Anonymous’ “man without a head” logo that was modified to depict a surveillance state. Perhaps even more interestingly, the image has a preexisting copyright and appears to have been originally used in an article describing Pakistan’s mass surveillance system - a system that appears to liaise with the National Security Agency.

Forty years after the Central Intelligence Agency’s experiments on U.S. citizens was revealed in a series of Congressional investigations, materials related to their findings and the CIA’s response live easily-accessible online.

A little known but extremely important part of the history of domestic surveillance by intelligence agencies is the CACTUS program. CACTUS was a highly classified channel used by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to transmit information about “the New Left, Black Militants and related matters.” This channel was never disclosed in the Church Committee reports, even when the reports discuss information that was transmitted through CACTUS.

In testimony before the Church Committee, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Deputy Director acknowledged that the Bureau at one point made up as much as one-fifth of the Klu Klux Klan’s total membership - but were still powerless to curtail the KKK’s violence. His testimony also acknowledged police participation in Klan violence, and that the Bureau had three times as many “ghetto informants” as they did those targeting white supremacist domestic terrorists.

Soon after legendary spymaster and CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton’s intelligence career supposedly ended with his forced retirement in December 1974 due to the exposure of CIA wrongdoing, he returned to the Agency, where counterintelligence operations reportedly remained under his purview until late 1975.

On February 16, 1976, the Village Voice went to press with an emblazoned “The Report on the CIA That President Ford Doesn’t Want You to Read.” Inside was a leaked copy on the findings of the Pike Committee, a lesser-known (and arguably more damning) companion to the Church Committee - and thanks to the Agency’s obsessive scrapbooking, you can read the full issue scanned into their declassified archives.

Whether because of the restrictive guidelines or, as Central Intelligence Agency’s own historian suggests, because of the censorship of the Pike Report, the Government Accountability Office continued to be denied any meaningful ability to audit CIA or aid in Congressional oversight. Several years later, a CIA memo would refer to this as them successfully “holding the GAO and their armies of auditors at bay.”

The 1975 Pike Committee’s report was an immediate problem for the Agency, and inevitably resulting in recommendations that the Central Intelligence Agency was desperate to avoid. These concerns, it seemed, were well founded, as the Committee ultimately recommended that the Government Accountability Office be granted audit authority over CIA - recommendations that CIA was able to, once again, successfully prevent from being implemented.

Decades before Donald Trump infamously compared the CIA to Nazi Germany, the National Security Council made its own allusion to the Holocaust - the difference was that in the NSC’s version, it was CIA that was cast as the potential victim of a “Final Solution” that might be imposed by Congress in response to the exposure of the Agency’s illegal and improper activities.

Congresswoman Bella Abzug infamously had issues with trusting CIA when it came to their handling evidence of illegal and improper Agency activities. Internal memos shows those fears were well-founded - while the Congresswoman fought to prevent the destruction of records of CIA wrongdoing, the Agency rushed to begin destroying everything they could.