Rights group sues FBI to reveal its surveillance rules
Published: June 24, 2009
Updated 5 months ago
A digital privacy watchdog group has filed suit against the Department of Justice in an attempt to make public new FBI surveillance rules that allow the bureau to spy on Americans even without any suspicion of terrorist activities.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been tracking the FBI’s new surveillance rules, in effect since late last year, which broadly expand the bureau’s ability to use surveillance methods previously limited only to terrorism investigations.
Now, the group has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, asking the government to “detail the Bureau’s procedures and standards for implementing the Attorney General’s Guidelines on approved surveillance strategies.”
In the waning months of the Bush administration, the Justice Department “released new guidelines … that empower FBI agents to use intrusive techniques to gather intelligence within the United States, alarming civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers who worry that they invite privacy violations and other abuses,” the Washington Post reported last year.
“The new road map allows investigators to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities in an effort to assess national security threats,” the article continued. “FBI agents could pursue each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization.”
“The Attorney General’s Guidelines are troubling, allowing for open investigative ‘assessments’ of any American without factual basis or reasonable suspicion,” EFF lawyer David Sobel said in a statement. “The withholding of the Operational Guidelines compounds our concerns. Americans have the right to know the basic surveillance policies used by federal investigators and how their privacy is — or is not — being protected.”
The EFF says it filed the lawsuit after the Justice Department failed to respond to a Freedom of Information request.
“These policies have been in effect for more than six months and could have great impact on ordinary Americans’ lives,” said Sobel. “The FBI must follow the law and release these guidelines to the public.”
The FBI has a long and storied history of spying on activist organizations, civil rights groups and other “subversives” going back to the era of J. Edgar Hoover. During the Bush administration, watchdog groups and activists alleged the FBI was using its expanded powers under the USA Patriot Act to spy on and infiltrate peaceful political and social movements.
3 comments
Printer Friendly |
Email
| Get breaking news alerts: Email/mobile |
There should also be an investigation as to why the FBI did not respond to a FOIA request. It’s a requirement. While we’re on this subject, didn’t Obama promise more “transparency” in government if elected? It’s not “clear” that this is what’s happening.
Yeah and he said we’d get out of Iraq in 16 months while on the campaign trail. We are never leaving Iraq. He is leaving 35,000 - 50,000 troops as a “residual” force after we “leave”. Oh and doubling the # of our troops in harms way in Afghanistan. You know, so we can spread democracy to them.
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”
~ Benjamin Franklin, leader of the American Revolution
“We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy… It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”
~ Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury to George Washington, author of the Federalist Papers
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
~ James Madison, 4th President of the United States, Father of the Constitution
“The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.”
~ John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States
“Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
~ John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1801-1835
You tell them EFF,,,,
I would like to know who compromised the FBI’S email service in Jan/Feb.2005 after I emailed all the FBI headquarters this,,
BUSH IS SPYING ON EVERYBODY UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY FOR POLITICAL REASONS,,
Then most of the FBI’s emails shut down,,
I called and they said they were compromised,,
This is a BIG Federal Crime,,
They may want to check with the Rothchilds’s MK Ultra program via the CIA..
How did I know that Bush was spying on everybody under national security for political reasons before the New York Times broke the story around Oct/Nov 2005,,,Hmmm
I wrote the ACLU and MSM and there email service didn’t get compromised..
I suppose it was the same criminals that had me carve FBI VICTIM in the ankles of my legs with a box cutter in July/August 2001…
The Rothchilds’s gang…