Enemies: A History of the FBI - Podcast by Pulitzer Prize Winner Tim Weiner

An excellent talk on his new book about the FBI from the author of Legacy of Ashes, the must read Pulitzer Prize winning history of the CIA.

Regarding the FBI, here is Wired's story of one tech company's efforts to prevent the Bureau from obtaining information about its customers, via a National Security Letter (NSL), which legally prevents those customers from being informed by the company that the FBI is seeking information about them. Here is a brief excerpt from Wired's article:

In 2007, a Justice Department Inspector General audit found that the FBI, which issued almost 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006, had indeed abused its authority and misused NSLs. 

The inspector general found that the FBI evaded limits on (and sometimes illegally issued) NSLs to obtain phone, e-mail and financial information on American citizens, and that it had also underreported the use of NSLs to Congress. In 2006 alone, the FBI issued more than 49,000 NSLs, but that number dropped dramatically to 16,804 in 2007 following the inspector general’s report. After the Justice Department claimed it instituted reforms to address the legal lapses, the number of NSLs issued increased to 24,744 in 2008. In 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the FBI issued 24,287 NSLs.

Without any further adieu, here is Tim Weiner's podcast.

Speaker(s): Tim Weiner
Chair: Professor George Gaskell

Recorded on 13 March 2012 in Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House.

The United States is a country founded on the ideals of democracy and freedom, yet throughout the last century it has used secret and lawless methods to destroy its enemies. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the most powerful of these forces. Following his award-winning history of the C.I.A., Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner has now written the first full history of the F.B.I. as a secret intelligence service, Enemies: A History of the FBI| which he will talk about in this lecture. Drawn entirely from firsthand materials in the F.B.I.'s own files, Enemies brilliantly brings to life the entire story, from the cracking of anarchist cells to the prosecution of the 'war on terror'. It is the story of America's war against spies, subversives and saboteurs - and the self-inflicted wounds American democracy suffered in battle. Throughout the book lies the long shadow of J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the F.B.I. with an iron fist for forty-eight years. He was not a monster, but a brilliant confidence man who ruled by fear, force, and fraud. His power shaped America; his legacy haunts it.

Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, where he has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and fifteen other nations. He was based for a decade in Washington, DC, where he covered the C.I.A. and the Military - the latter topic being the subject of his Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget. He is the author of the bestselling Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, which won the 2007 National Book Award for Non-Fiction.