Rage Against The Machine

Mario Savio (December 8, 1942 – November 6, 1996) was an American political activist.

In 2004, it was revealed that Mario was the subject of a massive FBI surveillance program even after he left the Free Speech Movement. The FBI trailed Mario Savio for more than a decade after he left UC Berkeley, and bureau officials plotted to "neutralize" him politically, even though there was no evidence he broke any federal law. According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:

• Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.


• Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.


• Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.


• Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a "Key Activist" whose political activities should be "disrupted" and "neutralized" under the bureau's extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
  

Savio's crime was that of a passion for humanity which never fails to antagonise the state into the most extreme forms of illegal and underhand activities.

On 2 December 1964, Savio gave one of the most impassioned speeches you will ever see or hear, a revolutionary address in which he struck at university establishment, wider society at large and which inspired a massive student sit-in that the authorities feared would spread beyond their ability to control it.

Here's how Mario Savio became an enemy of the state....