The NSA Spied on MLK, Muhammad Ali

The NSA once spied on no lesser Americans than Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali, newly declassified documents reveal. They were targeted along with a pair of US senators, as well as journalists from the New York Times and Washington Post, as part of a six-year effort to investigate Vietnam War opponents, dubbed "Project Minaret," al-Jazeera explains.

The Minaret program came to light in the 1970s, but a court finally ordered the names of its targets declassified yesterday, after a long legal battle from George Washington University. The program was green-lighted under Lyndon Johnson and continued under Richard Nixon, under the theory that foreign agents might be fomenting anti-war protests. "As shocking as the recent revelations about the NSA's domestic eavesdropping have been, there has been no evidence so far of today's signal intelligence corps taking a step like this, to monitor the White House's political enemies," write researchers with George Washington University's National Security Archive. (More Martin Luther King Jr. stories.)