Come Back, J. Edgar Hoover, All Is Forgiven

FBI's been monitoring green groups, using secret informants

Ever get the creepy feeling somebody's watching you? Well, it's not the weed: The FBI has been spying on U.S. environmental, animal-liberation, and other activist groups -- though the feds insist it's the innocuous, totally legal kind of spying. Greenpeace and PETA, among others, have shown up repeatedly in thousands of pages of heavily censored documents the American Civil Liberties Union received as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The Feebs not only monitored the protests and websites of such groups, but in some cases used confidential informants, from employees to interns, to gather the intel (you knew there was something fishy about that guy in the pleated khakis). Attempting to downplay the surveillance of domestic groups based on their administration-unfriendly politics, a bureau spokesspook said soothingly, "Just being referenced in an FBI file is not tantamount to being the subject of an investigation." We feel tons better. You?