Shiftheads - They Were Just Ordinary People. They Broke Into the FBI

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · May 21, 2026 · 19m

COINTELPRO is one of the largest government surveillance programs in American history. A group of ordinary people found the proof by picking the locks.

The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI spent months preparing a break-in at a Pennsylvania field office in 1971. One member learned lock picking through a mail-order course. Another spent weeks inside the building posing as a journalism student, mapping which rooms held the files.

What came out of those files reshaped American law. The FBI had sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of his Nobel Peace Prize, suggesting his…