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FBI 'Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide' targets innocent communities
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: October 31st, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/us/29manual.html
After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil. Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules. The F.B.I.s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era. But the manuals details have alarmed privacy advocates. It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they dont even suspect of wrongdoing, said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union. The manual authorizes agents to open an assessment to proactively seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats. Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following and photographing targets in public. When selecting targets, agents are permitted to consider political speech or religion as one criterion.
Note: To read the FBI's recently-released and redacted new "Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide", described by the New York Times as giving "F.B.I. agents the most power in national security matters that they have had since the post-Watergate era," click here.
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