Officials working for The White House would find "dirt" and personal information on those who were "short listed," and leak the information to the press.
Two of those "short listed" were Senator Edward Kennedy and the Democratic Speaker of the House at that time, Carl Albert.
In fact, Nixon even sent a couple of "spies" to be part of the Secret Service detail for Senator Kennedy, because he thought that the agents might catch Kennedy with a mistress, and that it would "ruin him for '76," referring to the 1976 election.
Nixon also used government agencies to go after his enemies.
The IRS was ordered to conduct audits of organizations opposed to Nixon's policies, and the CIA's Special Operations Group spied on leftist activist groups and black power groups.
And of course there were the "White House Plumbers," a covert White House Special Investigations Unit, which was involved in a lot of illegal activities, including the Watergate break-in.
Once the Watergate scandal broke open and news of illegal intelligence gathering by government agencies began to spread, Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, formed the Church Committee, which was tasked with investigating illegal intelligence gathering activities by the FBI, NSA, and CIA.
Between 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee published 14 reports on intelligence gathering abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.
In August of 1975, the Church Committee released its findings.
Senator Church went on NBC's Meet the Press after the findings were released, and said that...
"In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything -- telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
Church added that...
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
Fast-forward nearly four decades, and we are staring into that "abyss from which there is no return."
And while the technology may be different, the goals and methods are the same.
If the NSA and GCHQ are actively using the Internet to destroy people's lives, manipulate political discourse and quash civic activism, as Glenn Greenwald puts it, they're "compromising the integrity of the internet itself."
But more importantly, they're attacking our very freedoms and way of life.
We can't continue to let them run amok, and trample all over our lives.
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