 And now to Betty Metzger, as a reporter for the Washington Post in 1971, she was one of the only journalists willing to cover leaked documents exposing FBI crimes, including surveillance of students, of academics, of anti-war, and civil rights activists. One of the stolen files revealed the existence of one of the FBI's illegal programs, COINTELPRO, the COINTELPRO program under J. Edgar Hoover. She's the former chair of the Department of Journalism at San Francisco State University and the author of The Burglary, The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, Betty Metzger. I'm honored and humbled to be part of this panel that seeks justice for Julian Assange, sorely needed. I'm here with a case study, something that I think shows very clearly the great importance of protecting whistleblowers and the necessity of a free press. And it is the story of the people, the impact of the people who burglarized an FBI office in 1971 and then stole every file in the office and made them public. I've worked with them twice when I didn't know them and they sent files to me back in 1971. And then when I worked on the book, when they revealed their identity, even though the FBI had, at that time, the largest search that they had ever had and didn't find the burglars, they came out in 2014. These eight people were outside whistleblowers. They were average citizens, though they did extraordinary things. In fact, they called themselves a Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI. They had decided that because Congress and the executive branch had never carried out responsibility to oversee the FBI, they would exit oversight as citizens in order to get documentary evidence of whether the government was suppressing dissent. And they made the decision to do this after thinking very seriously about it. Three of them had very young children and they realized that if rested and convicted, they could serve many years in prison. But they thought it was so important to uncover what this hidden, all-powerful agency was doing that they decided to break into an office. They used tools quite different from what the tools of today's whistleblowers. Instead of multiple thumb drives or vast spaces on the internet, their tools were a crowbar, a car jack, large suitcases, flashlights, and getaway cars, and eventually copiers. But their motivation, their motivation was the same as the motivation of other whistleblowers, get important information to the public about injustices being done secretly by the government. They found what they were looking for, evidence of massive suppression of dissent. But they also found, and I should say, it's important, and this was 52 years ago, and nobody prior to that was writing about anything about intelligence agencies. It was assumed both by the government, by Congress, the people who should have had oversight, and by journalists that they had an obligation to let those agencies keep their secrets. There was no accountability. In the files that these people released, was it one thing was a shocking policy, enhance the paranoia, get the point across there's an agent behind every mailbox. They also found campus employees were hired as FBI informers to inform on students and faculty, and every black student on at least one campus in the Philadelphia area was under FBI surveillance. They also found that Hoover operated a massive Stasi-like program throughout the country against black Americans. Every agent in the country was forced to participate and had to hire an informer to create files on black people, to be black in Hoover's mind was to be dangerous and therefore subject to surveillance by the FBI. They also discovered that Hoover maintained a security index, an ever-expanding list of people believed by Hoover to be subversive and who were to be secretly detained by the FBI during a national emergency. Calls for congressional investigation of Hoover and FBI died less than two months after the burglary. Congress had no appetite for this. But thanks to NBC reporter Carl Stern, a congressional investigation later became imperative. Without Carl's determined effort to find out what COINTELPRO was, those bureau operations regarded eventually as the worst might never have been revealed. Carl would like to have been here with us today and I wish he could have been, but he has a very serious case of COVID. As a result of his successful lawsuit in December 1973, journalists were now armed with the stated purpose of COINTELPRO to secretly expose, disrupt, and neutralize political movements and they began requesting COINTELPRO files and they started pouring out. The public now learned for the first time that the FBI conducted lawless operations that range from crude to cruel to life-threatening and murder. Prostitutes known to have venereal disease were hired to infect campus activists. FBI informers were coached to give false testimony against innocent people, people known to be innocent to the person testifying, testimony that led to convictions and decades in prison for the falsely accused, most of them black people. A plot was designed to cause Martin Luther King to commit suicide and murder. An FBI informer provided the Chicago police with the crucial information that made it possible for police to shoot Fred Hampton dead as he slept. In January 1975, thanks to all this information that came out, both the House and the Senate opened investigations of FBI and all intelligence agencies. It was the first time Congress had done such a thing. At hearings, high FBI officials testified under oath that Bureau officials had never considered the legality or ethics of COINTELPRO or any other operations. These hearings and the reforms the senators successfully recommended would not have happened without whistleblowers who risked their freedom and a free press that reported their important revelations and ultimately a Congress that finally was willing to act, including establishing permanent intelligence oversight committees and strengthening the Freedom of Information Act. All of these reforms, as probably everybody in the room knows, have been battered and bruised at various times since then, but they exist and they are still valuable. It was Joe Biden's Congress that put in place the reforms that flowed from the media burglary. The Biden administration surely knows from the very important revelations made by whistleblowers in the past that this source of crucial information must not only not be threatened, but must be protected. To continue the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 could not only continue Mr. Assange's imprisonment for decades, it also could, in violation of the Constitution, gut the First Amendment rights of journalists. A radical result that surely neither President Biden nor Attorney General Garland wants to have as their legacy. Thank you.