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"This is the second volume of FBI files produced by the MuckRock team. This one is focused on scientists and consists of documents from the FBI files obtained by over 4,000 Freedom of Information Act Requests made by the MuckRock team. Some of these documents are available elsewhere (by FOIA requests made by others, and are ostensibly in the public domain). But much of this material has been released for the first time as a result of MuckRock's FOIA requests. As with the volume on Writers Morisy's team at MuckRock have done a lot of work in sifting through the files, compiling and curating material from almost 2 million pages of released documents. As they wrote in the editor's introduction: whereas the previous volume focused on people targeted for what they believed, this one looks at scientists who were targeted for what they know. As with the writer's volume the files collected here are greatly informed by the Cold War and the Bureau's war on communism. The stakes here are arguably higher, with a number of high profile scientists legitimately spying for the Soviet Union, such as Karl Fuchs and Ted Hall"-- Provided by publisher.

"Armed with ignorance, misinformation, and unfounded suspicions, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover cast a suspicious eye on scientists in disciplines ranging from physics to sex research. If the Bureau surveilled writers because of what they believed (as documented in Writers Under Surveillance), it surveilled scientists because of what they knew. Such scientific ideals as the free exchange of information seemed dangerous when the Soviet Union and the United States regarded each other with mutual suspicion that seemed likely to lead to mutual destruction. Scientists Under Surveillance gathers FBI files on some of the most famous scientists in America, reproducing them in their original typewritten, teletyped, hand-annotated form. Readers learn that Isaac Asimov, at the time a professor at Boston University's School of Medicine, was a prime suspect in the hunt for a Soviet informant codenamed ROBPROF (the rationale perhaps being that he wrote about robots and was a professor). Richard Feynman had a "hefty" FBI file, some of which was based on documents agents found when going through the Soviet ambassador's trash (an invitation to a physics conference in Moscow); other documents in Feynman's file cite an informant who called him a "master of deception" (the informant may have been Feynman's ex-wife). And the Bureau's relationship with Alfred Kinsey, the author of The Kinsey Report, was mutually beneficial, with each drawing on the other's data. The files collected in Scientists Under Surveillance were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by MuckRock, a nonprofit engaged in the ongoing project of freeing American history from the locked filing cabinets of government agencies." -- Publisher's description.

Neil Armstrong

Isaac Asimov

Hans Bethe

John P. Craven

Albert Einstein

Paul Erdős

Richard Feynman

Mikhail Kalashnikov

Alfred Kinsey

Timothy Leary

William Masters

Marvin Minsky

Arthur Rosenfeld

Vera Rubin

Carl Sagan

Nikola Tesla.

United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation > Records and correspondence.

Scientists > 20th century.

Governmental investigations > United States > History > 20th century.

History.

Biographies.