Last week, on the radio show On the Media, Brooke Gladstone offered listeners another installment in the ongoing saga of the National Security Agency’s increased scrutiny. Reporting on President Obama’s recent announcements about changes to the United States’ surveillance policies, On the Media and countless other news sources have been keeping close watch on the evolution of how the government spies on its own people. Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” coverage of the story highlights its absurdity and ubiquity. The jokes are sure to land.

Coverage of top-secret government policies is always a little preposterous. How relevant, really, are the President’s proclamations about something so covert? Amid this coverage, readers might want to beware the danger of reading Betty Medsger’s new book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI . Reading it might make you feel more impatient with both the broad jokes of SNL and the thoughtful analysis of NPR, and more like taking a crowbar to the offices of the NSA.

That’s just what Keith Forsyth did to the door of an FBI office in 1971. He was a member of a clandestine eight-person activist group that called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, a collection of mostly mild-mannered peace demonstrators organized to pull off one subversive act. Convinced that the FBI, under the longstanding directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, was using unsavory tactics to undermine the peace movement, they hatched a plan to break into the FBI offices in Media, PA, to see what they could find.

It was a risky plan and a wild gamble. While certain that the FBI’s tactics would generate headlines if exposed, they had no way of being sure that the files they stole that night would have anything revelatory in them, or even if they’d be able to decode their contents. But when they started leaking the documents to reporters, Burglary author Medsger picked up the story for the Washington Post (defying the Nixon administration’s plea to return the FBI papers), breaking what would be a major story covered by the Post and plenty of other papers.

The Burglary is the story of the activists who made the heist, and by extension, the man whose tactics they were hoping to expose. Before her gripping account of the break-in itself, Medsger lays out the activists’ motives, their plans, and the risk involved, as well as profiling Hoover, the intimidating bulldog at the top. Considering everything that could have gone wrong, it seems miraculous that no one was caught, and that Medsger’s new book provides the first substantial public forum for its participants. Four-plus decades after the immaculately planned act of defiance, their timing couldn’t be better.