It was International Women’s Day, March 8, 1971, when persons unknown broke into a small, two-person FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and disappeared into the night with suitcases containing some 800 official documents taken from file cabinets and desk drawers.

A group calling itself the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI took credit for the heist, and began sending selected documents to newspapers, revealing a broad program of illegal domestic spying on non-criminal groups, infiltration of political and campus organizations, and secret attempts to embarrass, discredit, or disrupt the lives of anti-war and civil rights activists.

The disclosure of these documents — like those of National Security Agency computer files made public by Edward Snowden — reverberated through the media, the public, and the Congress, eventually leading to a series of high profile Senate hearings and the creation of a system of oversight intended to prevent the excesses that had been disclosed.

Despite more than 100 FBI agents assigned to comb 15 states for clues about the burglary, no one was ever charged and the case was closed after the statute of limitations expired in 1976.

Now, several of those responsible have come forward, and their story is told in a new book by former Washington Post reporter, Betty Medsger, who covered the story when it first broke back in the 1970s. Her book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI,” was published this week.

In those pre-digital days before the internet, it took longer for the documents to circulate. I can vividly recall receiving the March 8, 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, associated with the pacifist War Resisters League, which reprinted hundreds of the original FBI documents.

A breakdown of the documents from the small FBI office, included in an introduction to what became known as the Media Papers, showed the political bias of the agency at the time.

Forty percent of the documents involved surveillance and other investigation of political activity. Of the cases being followed, two involved right wing groups, 10 immigrant issues, and more than 200 involved liberal or left groups.

Twenty-five percent involved major crimes like murder, rape, and interstate theft.

Seven percent involved draft resistance or refusing induction into the military. An additional 7 percent involved military personal who went AWOL.

Only 1 percent of the office’s cases involved organized crime, mostly gambling.

One of the documents liberated from the FBI led to disclosure of its COINTELPRO, or Counterintelligence Program. Dating back to the depths of the Cold War in the mid-1950s, it targeted individuals and organizations defined as potentially “subversive” by the longtime FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover.

The New York Times on Tuesday quoted a former aide to Sen. Frank Church, who chaired the committee that later investigated COINTELPRO and related programs: “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”

Hawaii had at least some experience with this aspect of COINTELPRO. Under its umbrella, FBI agents monitored antiwar groups on the University of Hawaii campus, and even spied on the sexual activity of student activists.

A June 1968 memo from the agent in charge of the Honolulu FBI office to Director Hoover reported: “The Agent and informants assigned to these investigations have been instructed to be alert for any evidence of immorality that might offer an opportunity for disruption … this office is considering the possibility of suggesting some manner of alerting families of SDS members on the mainland of their activities.”

Other documents disclosed that the FBI used informants to attend meetings of UH-based “Committee to End the War in Vietnam,” who passed on advance word on the group’s activities, while military intelligence agencies received reports on peace groups on the UH campus from military personnel enrolled as students.

These reports are suggestive, but without benefit of the sort of inside look provided by the Media files, we’ll probably never know whether there were other, more sinister exercises of the FBI’s secret powers in Hawaii during this period.

In retrospect, we owe a large debt to the small group of activists who took upon themselves the risk of breaking in to an FBI office in order to inform the rest of the country about the extent of illegal spying, and worse. Without this peaceful direct action, the public and our elected officials would likely have been kept at bay by the FBI’s denials and obfuscations, and the illegal activities would not have been curbed.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we owe the same kind of debt to Edward Snowden. He has, at great personal risk, brought to light an even more unbelievable system of rampant surveillance with its own set of assaults on everyday freedoms.

I will read about the past in Medsger’s book on the Media burglary, but act in the present by taking all available opportunities to support Edward Snowden.

Read Ian Lind’s blog at iLind.net.