Editing John Lennon (section)

===FBI surveillance and declassified documents===
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{{Further|Jon Wiener#Wiener and the Lennon FBI files}}
[[File:Lennon FBI Files after ny19p1.jpg|thumb|alt=Document with portions of text blacked out, dated 1972.|Confidential (here declassified and censored) letter by [[J. Edgar Hoover]] about FBI surveillance of John Lennon]]
After Lennon's death, historian [[Jon Wiener]] filed a [[Freedom of Information Act (United States)|Freedom of Information Act]] request for [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] files that documented the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt.{{sfn|Wiener|1999|p=13}} The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the [[American Civil Liberties Union]] of [[Southern California]]. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages.{{sfn|Friedman|2005|p=252}} The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the [[United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit|Ninth Circuit]] in 1991.<ref>{{cite court |litigants=Wiener v. F.B.I. |vol=943 |reporter=F.2d |opinion=972 |court=9th Cir. |date=12 July 1991 |url=https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7189886552569743506}}</ref>{{sfn|Wiener|1999|p=315}} The [[United States Department of Justice|Justice Department]] appealed the decision to the [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]] in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case.{{sfn|Wiener|1999|pp=52–54, 76}} In 1997, respecting President [[Bill Clinton]]'s newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.{{sfn|Wiener|1999|pp=52–54, 76}}

Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. ''Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files'' contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges".{{sfn|Wiener|1999|p=27}} The story is told in the documentary ''The US vs. John Lennon''. The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.{{sfn|The Associated Press|2006}}