FBI: 31 Alarming Facts About Federal Bureau of Investigation

In 1971, a small group calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Philly, stole over 1000 documents, exposed the extreme surveillance program COINTELPRO, and then sent these documents to the press, leading to the FBI shutting it down.

27. The FBI used mail delivery robots (Marvin) in their field offices that navigated the buildings by using cells of black lights to follow an invisible fluorescent paint sprayed onto the carpet to designate its route.

28. A set of notes, written in an unknown cipher, was found in the pocket of a dead man (Ricky McCormick) in 1999 and the FBI and leading cryptographers have been completely unable to crack the code.

29. The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (Mark Johnson-Williams) was suspected by the FBI of being the Unabomber.

30. Mob boss John Gotti would offer coffee to the FBI agents assigned to tail him.

In 2006, the FBI convicted a crime family using evidence collected by remotely enabling the microphone on a cell phone. This is called a "roving bug."