One unexpected fringe benefit of a surveillance state is that it can make for a surprisingly comprehensive biographer. To commemorate International Women’s Day at MuckRock, we put together a collection of all of our articles on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s forays into the lives of prominent women over the decades.

Loving Bella Abzug is easy - unless you’re in the Central Intelligence Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation. Then she was a dangerous leftist who needed to be monitored. Here are several reasons why she should be your nonproblematic fav, based on her FBI file and documents in CIA’s declassified archive.

A little known but extremely important part of the history of domestic surveillance by intelligence agencies is the CACTUS program. CACTUS was a highly classified channel used by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to transmit information about “the New Left, Black Militants and related matters.” This channel was never disclosed in the Church Committee reports, even when the reports discuss information that was transmitted through CACTUS.

Congresswoman Bella Abzug infamously had issues with trusting CIA when it came to their handling evidence of illegal and improper Agency activities. Internal memos shows those fears were well-founded - while the Congresswoman fought to prevent the destruction of records of CIA wrongdoing, the Agency rushed to begin destroying everything they could.

Declassified records recently unearthed in CREST show the CIA waffled on a promise to obey the law in not destroying records of Agency’s illegal activities and wrongdoing.