The week before last, The Washington Post concluded a two-year investigation of our government's domestic spying activities, revealing a lack of accountability pervading its far-flung and vast operations. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, confirming that the FBI is violating the constitutional rights of Americans en masse -- as it has done before.
Adding insult to injury, the Bureau now preposterously demands even further powers beyond those dramatically extended by the PATRIOT Act. At a minimum, Congress should emphatically reject demands for FBI access to "electronic communication transactional records," such as email meta-data and browsing history. However, Congress must also go further, by -- as a coalition of nearly 50 peace, environmental, civil rights, and civil liberties groups this week requested -- shining light on the Bureau's violations of constitutional rights, and considering long overdue legislative limits to constrain the FBI.
President Eisenhower warned 50 years ago that national security could undermine democracy by subverting popular policy preferences. His warning was prescient. In the 1960s, the FBI pursued a concerted campaign to undermine the civil rights movement by criminalizing groups, like the NAACP, pursuing peaceful political activities protected by the First Amendment.
This is no conspiracy theory: Congress documented wanton FBI abuses in over 14,000 pages of testimony. According to the Church committee, the FBI's activities then
would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights....
Revelations of the FBI's "COINTELPRO" (counter-intelligence program) prompted a national outrage that forced the Department of Justice to enact limits in 1976 curtailing the Bureau's various abuses. Today, these problems are back.
The Attorney General's Guidelines that once constrained the FBI have faced repeated erosion, culminating in revisions in 2008 -- adopted despite congressional objections in the last full month of the Bush administration -- that essentially invite racial and political profiling.
The 2008 Mukasey Guidelines hold that race may serve as a factor justifying scrutiny, and even grants individual agents discretion to use intrusive investigatory methods without any evidence suggesting that a crime has been committed. This week, Mueller mistakenly claimed before the Senate that FBI agents must at least have a suspicion of wrongdoing before beginning surveillance -- but later conceded that, in fact, FBI surveillance is not limited even by suspicion.
This bears repetition: the FBI currently conducts monitoring and surveillance operations based on neither evidence nor suspicion. Think about that for a moment.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures" and specifically requires judicially authorized warrants based on "probable cause" that "particularly describe[] the place to be searched." For centuries, courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment to require individualized suspicion for searches. Mueller's testimony confirms that no requirement for suspicion at all (not even suspicion impermissibly based on association or race) currently constrains agents from monitoring law-abiding Americans.
The Bureau has engaged in political spying for nearly a decade, infiltrating peaceful activist groups and suppressing dissent in the name of disingenuous national security. Nor has the Bureau carefully limited its targets: "[f]aith institutions, activist groups advocating for causes as varied as pro-life and pro-choice stances on reproductive rights, environmental causes...and animal rights have all been affected."
Worse yet, the Bureau's standard for undercover activities is known neither by the public nor Congress. I wrote a FOIA request that led to the FBI's disclosure of part of its policy, but the section on undercover infiltration remains secret. Intelligence agencies may justifiably pursue clandestine activities, but should not operate according to secret rules--at least not in countries that claim to lead the free world.
What little transparency we have confirms fears of abuse. In at least three separate reports (in 2007, 2008 and 2010) over the last four years, the Justice Department's Inspector General has documented rampant abuse of powers that the FBI received through the PATRIOT Act--as well as further abuse of entirely new powers invented by the FBI with the support of the Obama administration.
The Bureau has received a free pass long enough. As a civil rights coalition argued to the Senate this week, "Congress should not grant the FBI guidelines artificial legitimacy, nor should the Bureau be afforded credibility that it has not only failed to earn, but actively undermined....As a repeat offender, the Bureau is long overdue for intervention by Congress." New powers demanded by the FBI should be denied, and as recently demanded by the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the Bureau's leadership should be replaced.
An abridged version of this article was also posted by Truthout.
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If I am correct and you are one of the lawyers that make up the Robert Jackson Steering Committe.. the damages done to victims need recourse
why learning narratives of victims even in cases of prima facia matter.. or aggression will be a practice art of hatred as entertainment
The FBI infiltrating us, or the corporate intelligence professionals infiltrating them... I don't know which is worse.
It sounds like the intelligence communities in the United States are utterly out of control, and no one even knows where they begin and end.
Sounds like a great way to get and manipulate intelligence and reality, but pretty unreliable, and not at all secure.
Of course, as Ron Suskind discovered under the last administration, When they act, they create their own realities. And while you're studying that reality, -judiciously as you will- they will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things are going to be sorted out. They're history's actors... and us, all of us, will be left to study what they do.
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=10072008A
As said above, we're left to be the analyzers of history - often the reason they put forward for something isn't the real reason they want it. They know PSDM doesn't solve future problems, but it enables them to deal with (on their terms) their current reality.
Pattern-Seeking Data-mining Methods may be of limited use to the Federal Agencies who might actually care about citizens privacy, but I bet their usefulness would be inestimable to certain plumbers, dirty tricksters and, of course, "Rat 'uckers."
There has been very little transparency surrounding what SonicBPhuct refers to as the "Tech Police State," but I guess we should never the question the ethics of a spy... I mean, If the spy waves the American Flag and professes to be a patriot. Other countries spies, well, they are probably the base creatures that spies have always had a reputation for being.
How this all relates to the freedom animating our nation's struggle in the Cold War is also underexplored. I started a series several months ago about "losing wars we already won" starting with WWII and torture, and have been meaning to write for awhile about how our surveillance regimes erodes America's victory in the Cold War and represents a (perhaps surprising to some, and hopefully persuasive to conservatives, in particular) bizarre emergence of Soviet principles in the U.S.
So, being generally agreeable to the Wills timeline, I see the 'surveillance regime' as having grown up within the executive branch and beyond decades earlier, bloated and metasticized beyond all proportion by the fear and revenge impulses of our security fetishists after 9-11, and by the technological developments in data storage and retrieval that were already in progress. The sheer capacity of our intelligence gathering agencies to use what computer networks can gather and retrieve, a capacity which doubles at a predictable rate, makes its own momentum, almost apart from institutional intention, in that the sorting and gathering is almost a passive business, so that decisions need not be made to perform these functions-- they just sort of happen after a bit of programming. At its introduction into American life, the computer seemed a perfect example to promoters of state intrusion of how old law might not apply to new apparatuses and what they conveyed-- like e-mails, etc. So the old laws protecting our privacy have mostly in practice at least, been mooted or superceded by technology and its promoters; our data is gathered and sorted beyond oversight or consent.