“American attitudes towards wiretapping significantly shifted during the 1940s, as the war and changes in the class distribution of telephones helped shift judicial acceptance of wiretaps.  President Roosevelt issued a secret executive order authorizing widespread Justice Department wire-taps of ‘subversives’ and suspected spies. Hoover used these vague new powers to investigate not just Nazis but anyone he thought subversive.  The social history of wiretaps is a history of mission creep, where FBI agents initially hunting for wartime Nazi spies soon monitored progressive activists fighting racial segregation.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/09/a-social-history-of-wiretaps-2/

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