[jlgreco]

Fears and cautions should not be tied to organizations themselves, but rather to actions. The NSA is not the FBI, yet memories of Hoover should give pause to anyone considering the NSA.

Tying fear and caution to organizations prevents you from learning much of anything from history as the offending organizations are almost all abolished, abandoned, or reorganized. Should experimentalists working in medicine and the humanities not learn from the Tuskegee Experiment because Public Health Service is a different organization today and the Tuskegee Institute no longer exists in a meaningful way?

[tptacek]

I don't think anybody disagrees with the broad point you're making; this subthread is talking about how likely it is that the FBI is blackmailing people and trying (clumsily) to convince people to kill themselves based on the actions of Hoover's FBI.