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Comment by staplers | Hacker News Reader

It has been well known for a while that the FBI threatened and blackmailed MLK Jr. while he was engaging in peaceful protest.

This revelation should come as no surprise to anyone.

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I was aware of that. But I would be surprised if the contemporaneous MKULTRA program existed today.

Honest question: why? Have the stakes or the players changed so much? It’s not as though the original MKULTRA and other human experiments which have been acknowledged led to a lot of jail time or ruined careers. We’re the people who kidnap to black sites and torture poeple, the same poeple who nuked our own soldiers and innocent islanders.

What’s changed?

I agree with you, but wanted to make a correction. MKULTRA was the batshit scheme to hypnotize and mind control people where they dosed people with LSD. You're probably thinking of COINTELPRO, the FBI program of activist and political suppression.

And none of these people or institutions were meaningfully punished or even paid in any way, so I don't see much reason to think they've changed. Just takes time for this stuff to come out. Even local cops use infiltrators on the most harmless of movements. I was attending the university at this time and this was a huge scandal:

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/2013/03/01/undercover-ucpd-det...

At least today we have the investigative reporting from the Intercept. It's kind of crazy the lengths to which citizens had to go through to get the word out about COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Commission_to_Invest...

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