[iwar] [fc:Government.Will.Ease.Limits.on.Domestic.Spying.by.F.B.I.]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-05-30 08:08:17


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Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 08:08:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Government.Will.Ease.Limits.on.Domestic.Spying.by.F.B.I.]
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Government Will Ease Limits on Domestic Spying by F.B.I.
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
NY Times

WASHINGTON, May 29 ‹ As part of a sweeping effort to transform the F.B.I.
into a domestic terrorism prevention agency, Attorney General John Ashcroft
has decided to relax restrictions on the bureau's ability to conduct
domestic spying in counterterrorism operations, senior government officials
said today.

Mr. Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, plan to announce on Thursday a broad loosening of the
guidelines that restrict the surveillance of religious and political
organizations, the officials said. The guidelines were adopted after
disclosures of domestic F.B.I. spying under the old Cointelpro program, and
for 25 years they have been among the most fundamental limits on the
bureau's conduct.

The revision will shift the power to initiate counterterrorism inquiries
from headquarters to the special agents in charge of the 56 field offices,
the officials said.

"We are turning the ship 180 degrees from prosecution of crimes as our main
focus to the prevention of terrorist acts," a senior Justice Department
official said tonight. "We want to make sure that we do everything possible
to stop the terrorists before they can kill innocent Americans, everything
within the bounds of the Constitution and federal law."

Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the new
guidelines, saying they represent another step by the Bush administration to
roll back civil-liberties protections in the name of improving
counterterrorism measures.

"These new guidelines say to the American people that you no longer have to
be doing something wrong in order to get that F.B.I. knock at your door,"
Laura W. Murphy, director of the national office of the A.C.L.U., said. "The
government is rewarding failure. It seems when the F.B.I. fails, the
response by the Bush administration is to give the bureau new powers, as
opposed to seriously look at why the intelligence and law enforcement
failures occurred."

Under the old guidelines, agents needed to show that they had probable cause
or information from an informer that crimes were being committed to begin
counterterrorism investigations. Under the new guidelines, agents will be
free to search for leads or clues to terrorist activities in public
databases or on the Internet.

Under the old guidelines, surfing the Internet for the sole purpose of
developing leads was prohibited.

Among other changes, the new guidelines let agents search Web sites and
online chat rooms for evidence of terrorists' planning or other criminal
activities, the officials said.

The bureau will also use commercial "data-mining services" from companies
that collect, organize and analyze marketing and demographic information
from the Internet to help develop leads on potential crimes like threats to
the security of computer networks. Businesses routinely use the information,
but the bureau has been constrained from using those services.

The guidelines were imposed in the 1970's after the disclosures about
Cointelpro, a widespread domestic surveillance program that monitored
antiwar militants, the Ku Klux Klan and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
among others, while J. Edgar Hoover was bureau director.

Beyond the reports of the spying, a political firestorm arose over what many
critics regarded as the abuse of power. The surveillance guidelines have
since then defined the operational conduct of the bureau in inquiries of
domestic and overseas groups that operate in the United States.

Since Sept. 11, the guidelines have been criticized by many law enforcement
officials as an outmoded counterterrorism tool that hampered efforts.

A senior agent in the Minneapolis office, Coleen Rowley, complained on May
21 in a letter to Mr. Mueller that officials at headquarters had repeatedly
held back agents in the field office who sought to investigate Zacarias
Moussaoui aggressively in the four weeks before Sept. 11.

Senior officials said today that Mr. Ashcroft's new guidelines addressed
some of Ms. Rowley's complaints. Ms. Rowley, general counsel in the
Minneapolis office, also complained that agents there had no idea that an
agent in Phoenix wrote in a memorandum to headquarters in July that Arab
men, possibly connected to Osama bin Laden, had trained at a flight school
in Arizona.

Under the new guidelines, field offices will no longer have to await
approval for intelligence investigations from headquarters. Headquarters
would often take weeks or even months before deciding whether an inquiry was
warranted.

Instead, the field offices could begin counterterrorism inquiries
themselves. Inquiries can last from 180 days to one year before being
reviewed by senior officials.

"Agent Rowley's concerns are thoroughly addressed in the F.B.I.
reorganization and the attorney general's guidelines," a senior official
said tonight. "We are devolving power to begin and conduct investigations to
the field offices and freeing their hands to do everything possible within
the bounds of the Constitution and federal law to protect us from
terrorists."

Under the current guidelines, the bureau cannot send undercover agents to
investigate groups that gather at places like mosques or churches unless
investigators first find probable cause or evidence that leads them to
believe that someone in the group may have broken the law. Such full
investigations cannot proceed without the attorney general's consent.

Many investigators have complained since Sept. 11 that Islamic militants
have sometimes met at mosques, apparently knowing that religious
institutions are usually off limits to F.B.I. surveillance squads.

A lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, Gregory T. Nojeim, predicted
that the new guidelines would cause a flood of new information that the
bureau will have trouble analyzing.

"The problem with the 9/11 investigation was a failure to analyze and act on
relevant information," Mr. Nojeim said. "And their solution is to gather
exponentially more information that they have no possible way to properly
analyze."

A senior official at the Justice Department dismissed that criticism.

"Under the new rules," the official said, "we allow the field to conduct the
investigations and we will give headquarters the ability to analyze the
information. No longer will there be disparate pieces of information
floating around in isolation in different parts of the country. Now you will
have a much greater ability to connect those dots."

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