The NSA secretly watchlisted Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali for six years

MINARET began under a narrow, specific premise: determine whether foreign governments were funding or directing the domestic antiwar movement. The CIA and Army first assembled candidate names, and the FBI contributed additional ones. The NSA's own internal history is candid about the atmosphere driving it, describing 1967 as a year the country appeared to be going up in flames. The program ultimately covered more than 5,925 foreign nationals and 1,690 American organizations and individuals across both the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

NSA Director Lew Allen later testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the agency had issued more than 3,900 reports on the watchlisted Americans. Attorney General Elliot Richardson shut the program down in 1973, amid the unfolding Watergate scandal, over concerns about its legality. A 1977 Department of Justice review concluded wiretap laws had in fact been violated. MINARET's exposure directly contributed to the 1978 creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law still governing electronic surveillance of Americans today.

This establishes that the NSA formally operated a warrantless surveillance program targeting named American citizens, including a sitting senator who would later chair the very committee investigating intelligence abuses, for six years across two presidential administrations, and that a subsequent Justice Department review found the underlying wiretap laws had been violated. This is confirmed by the NSA's own declassified internal history, released in 2013 following a National Security Archive request.

What this does not establish is that every individual on the 1,600-plus name list was surveilled with the same intensity or for the same duration; the roster spans genuine national security concerns about foreign contacts alongside clearly political targets, and the declassified record does not provide equal detail on every name it contains.