When The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers it sparked one of the greatest battles for press freedom in US history. In an unprecedented move, the Nixon administration sought to bar The New York Times from publishing further. The Times...

Daniel Ellsberg is the most iconic whistleblower in US history. On our inaugural episode, he joins host Chip Gibbons for an in-depth conversation. On the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers release, Ellsberg explains how...

The FBI has long devoted its resources to stamping out dissent. As part of its ruthless war on the Communist Party, the Bureau set its sites on America’s folk singers. In his new book The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists a...

In our final episode, we explore the Defending Rights & Dissent’s own origins. Frank Wilkinson was a public housing advocate who was working on an integrated public housing project in Chavez Ravine, The FBI and HUAC working together, hounde...

The Second Red Scare may have been named after the demagogic Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, but no one was more central to it than J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Host Chip Gibbons is joined by renowned historian...

Since 9/11, the FBI has subjected the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities to surveillance. Sending infiltrators and confidential informants into mosques and other community spaces absent any evidence of criminal wronging, it’s clear th...

The Young Lords were a political organization led predominantly by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth. They emerged as part of the larger New Left, but as advocates of Puerto Rican independence they were part of a much older lineage of r...

The FBI was ruthless in its pursuit of civil rights activists. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan was engaged in a reign of terror. How did the FBI's attitude towards those fighting nonviolently for racial justice compare to its attitude toward...

The FBI is still spying on dissent. But how do we know what they’re up to? On this episode, Alice Speri of The Intercept talks about the importance of the Freedom of Information Act and whistleblowers to journalists reporting on FBI su...

In our conclusion of Still Spying’s three-part exploration of the FBI’s war on Black dissent we bring the story up to the present. In response to police violence and white supremacy, the US has witnessed renewed movements for racial ju...

In what Noam Chomksy called the “gravest domestic crime of the Nixon Administration,” the FBI orchestrated a Chicago police raid that killed Black Panther Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. In part two of a three part exploration of the FBI’s War ...

What does the neutral application of the law mean if the law itself is not neutral? Still Spying podcast host Chip Gibbons & noted abolitionist Alex S. Vitale. explore the political nature of federal and local...

An exploration into the history of the FBI looking into certain political activities and political actors that conspicuously all seemed to have a common denominator.Also, a one-on-one conversation with Mike German, a retired FBI agent a...