RIP Ernie Lazar, the original FOIA assassin, whose obsession with the John Birch Society and the far right led him to dig & dig & dig into FBI records

[basquebromance]

Ernie fought for and collected thousands of government records over the course of his life, in a quest to document right-wing movements and government repression. Lazar was one of the few tuned into the danger of the far right long before Trump RIP

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/11/08/ernie-lazar-fbi-archive-dies/

Ernie Lazar, Who Trawled for Secret Government Documents, Dies at 77

By pursuing his “unusual hobby” of filing as many as 10,000 Freedom of Information requests about extremist groups, he proved invaluable to historians and journalists.

www.nytimes.com