And Morton Sobell, who was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at the height of the McCarthy era, has died at the age of 101. Sobell served 18 years in prison and maintained his innocence until 2008, when he told The New York Times he had been a Soviet spy, though he said he “never thought of it as that in those terms.” In a 2003 interview on Democracy Now!, Sobell compared government persecution in the past and present.

Morton Sobell: “And I say today is much, much worse. For instance, during McCarthyism, the FBI had prepared a list of 20,000 communists to be picked up overnight and put into the concentration camps where the Japanese had been kept. They also prepared a brief for the Supreme Court to suspend habeas corpus. So they wanted to keep the forms proper. They wanted a legal basis for suspending habeas corpus. The gang today doesn’t even go to court to suspend. They suspend habeas corpus without any leave of the courts. So, in that sense, it’s closer to fascism than it ever was during the McCarthy period.”