COINTELPRO was the FBI's covert program to disrupt organizing among African Americans fighting for civil rights, and this film tracks its methods and its casualties. Directors Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller, who also made the Howard Zinn documentary, build the account from archival footage and interviews with people who lived through the surveillance, infiltration, and smear campaigns J. Edgar Hoover's bureau ran against black political figures and organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film moves past the official framing of COINTELPRO as routine intelligence work and lays out how the program targeted specific leaders and groups for discrediting, disruption, and worse, using memos and testimony to show intent rather than accident. Survivors and organizers who were watched, arrested, or driven apart by the operation speak directly to camera about what it cost them. The picture that emerges is of a federal agency treating a domestic rights movement as an enemy to be neutralized rather than a constituency to be governed.