&gt; Theres real threats out there<p>In 1972 the threat was the Democrats being elected president, so workers on the president&#x27;s re-election committee burglarized the Democratic National Committee&#x27;s headquarters at the Watergate hotel.  Then Nixon (on tape!) hashed out a plan to have the FBI cover this up.  Without a high-up leaker in the FBI, none of this may have ever come to light. (Actually, Nixon did something similar in 1968 against Humphrey, by convincing the South Vietnamese government to not hold peace talks.  He not only betrayed the US but the South Vietnamese he made a deal with, since he pulled US troops out in 1972)<p>Then of course there is the FBI acting as a political police - disrupting the civil rights movement, bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and leaking information gained to the media, attacking those Democrats who were voting against continuing the Vietnam War etc.<p>Some of these excesses were pulled back in the 1970&#x27;s, but in recent years they have begun raising their head again.  And the country isn&#x27;t even in such bad shape economically, militarily etc.  I can image what would happen if there were another Depression, sit down strikes etc.<p>In 1929, the Secretary of State (a Republican!) shut down post-WWI domestic spying saying &quot;gentlemen do not read other gentlemen&#x27;s mail&quot;.  Now we have these massive police bureaucracies who apparently don&#x27;t care about the Fourth Amendment, and who are advising Congress that we shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to have private communications with one another on our iPhones etc., all should be opened to the ears of Big Brother.<p>Keep walking down this road, and the &quot;threats&quot; like the mujahideen (funded by the previous generation of your type who explained to us that &quot;Theres real threats out there&quot;) will not die down, but multiply, and will increasingly be from citizens within this country.