The National Security Agency, or NSA, pried on civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., former boxing champion Muhammad Ali and several other prominent Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when protests against the Vietnam War peaked, according to declassified documents published on Wednesday by George Washington University.
The NSA also targeted prominent public figures including New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald and two prominent members of Congress, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), as well as civil rights leader Whitney Young.
The highly sensitive documents, which were released in response to an appeal to a government panel by the university’s National Security Archive, showed that some NSA officials, at the time, saw the operation targeting prominent personalities as “disreputable if not outright illegal.”
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