{"id":13491,"date":"2012-02-10T11:03:13","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T16:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13491"},"modified":"2013-05-31T10:09:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T15:09:33","slug":"before-watergate-the-fbi-had-to-put-together-files-using-wiretaps-informants-and-detective-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/10\/before-watergate-the-fbi-had-to-put-together-files-using-wiretaps-informants-and-detective-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Before Watergate the FBI had to put together files using wiretaps, informants, and detective work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nowadays, of course, they wouldn’t need to do any of that: most of what they collected then could be gathered by looking you up on Facebook<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are perhaps best known for their comedy sketch Who’s on First?<\/p>\n

But in the 1950s, the duo caught the FBI’s attention for other reasons.<\/p>\n

“A police informant furnished information to the effect that Bud Abbott, the well-known motion picture and television star, is a collector of pornography, and alleged he has 1,500 reels of obscene motion pictures,” an agent wrote in an FBI file.<\/p>\n

Of Costello, agents reported: “Information was secured reflecting that two prostitutes put on a lewd performance for Lou Costello,” for which they were paid $50 each.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

During the era of legendary FBI director J Edgar Hoover, “you could find a reason to open a file on anyone”, says Steve Rosswurm, a historian at Lake Forest College in Illinois and author of a book about the FBI’s dealings with the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

“The reasons for the surveillance are as varied as the people being watched,” said British writer Nicholas Redfern, author of Celebrity Secrets: Official Government Files on the Rich and Famous<\/em><\/p>\n

“It was very much dependent upon the character or the situation the subject of the file was in.”<\/p>\n

Today, the bureau’s Cold War-era fears of communist infiltration, obscenity and homosexuality sound almost quaint..<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nowadays, of course, they wouldn’t need to do any of that: most of what they collected then could be gathered by looking you up on Facebook: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are perhaps best known for their comedy sketch Who’s on First? But in the 1950s, the duo caught the FBI’s attention for other reasons. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,10,13],"tags":[780,476,282,98,720,911],"class_list":["post-13491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-communism","tag-espionage","tag-fbi","tag-police","tag-protest","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3vB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20508,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13491\/revisions\/20508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}