Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI was an activist group in the United States during the early 1970s. Their only known action was breaking into the field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) located in Media, Pennsylvania and stealing over 1,000 classified documents. Disclosure of the files led to public scrutiny of surreptitious FBI activities and several reforms.

Selected documents were mailed anonymously to several US newspapers, exposing numerous illegal FBI operations targeting First Amendment-protected activities of U.S. citizens. Most news outlets initially refused to publish the information, saying it related to ongoing operations and that disclosure might have threatened the lives of agents or informants. The Washington Post, after confirming the authenticity of the files, ran a front-page story on March 24, 1971; other media organizations then followed suit.

"The complete collection of political documents ripped off from the F.B.I. office in Media, Pa., March 8, 1971" was published for the first time as the March 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, a journal associated with the War Resisters League. The documents revealed the FBI's secret COINTELPRO operation, resulting in creation by the United States Senate of the Church Committee and the cessation of COINTELPRO. Noam Chomsky has stated:

According to [the Citizens' Commission's] analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1 percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were "manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter"; 40 percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and "leaving the military without government permission." The remainder [about 15 percent] concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.

The theft resulted in the exposure of some of the FBI's most self-incriminating documents, including several detailing the FBI's use of postal workers, switchboard operators, etc., in order to spy on black college students and various non-violent black activist groups.

Some 40 years after their action, some of the perpetrators agreed to go public. In 2014, Betty Medsger's book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret F.B.I. was released, which contains the burglars' description of the burglary and revealed the identities of five of the eight burglars. That same year, filmmaker Johanna Hamilton made a documentary titled 1971 about the group, its action, and the aftermath.