F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds

[TomClash]

Source: NY Times

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html?hp

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Do we even pretend there is a Fourth Amendment anymore?

[TomClash]

1. Oops dupe I just saw it

Please delete

[Uncle Joe]

7. This is a dupe, perhaps starting a rare Wiener Thread would've been more appropriate.

:spank:

Thanks for the thread, TomClash.

[RandomThoughts]

2. Which allows many of those very people to be searched, and seized.

To protect average citizens from there extra judicial methods.

[barbtries]

3. this is the one i saw.

the answer to your question is yes, we pretend there's a 4th amendment...it's just doesn't mean anything.

[Arctic Dave]

4. Why, all they need to do is write up a bogus terr'ist security letter.

Sounds like they are just trying to make legal what they are already doing.

[SoapBox]

5. The March of the Police State continues...

Facism is on a roll.

[JDPriestly]

6. Waste of time and money.

Real dangers often come from the very places and people you were so sure were safe. You can never have enough surveillance to protect from all harm. No one would want to live in a place that "secure." Might as well just put everyone in prison to begin with.

And this, at a time when we are cutting spending. How ridiculous.

[Javaman]

8. Please define "leeway".

they can already bust into our homes without identifying themselves, they can already search us if they "smell" pot, they tap our phone lines, they track our cell phones, they cavity search our bodies at airports and this new thing is "leeway"?

oh fucking please, cut the crap.