Today, wiretapping is considered a criminal invasion of privacy… but it wasn’t always so. On this day in 1973, John Lennon sued the United States Government to admit that it was wiretapping his phone. It turns out Lennon’s anti-war campaign (coincidentally slated before President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election) had attracted the notice of the FBI – which monitored all of Lennon’s activities, and then threatened him with deportation. This topic is explored in depth in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. The justice-loving, musically fertile Libra was murdered 7 years later in an unrelated criminal act in New York City – in 1980.
