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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Hugo Chavez on August 29, 2008, 09:20:43 AM
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In recent weeks, Bush administration officials have introduced a number of provisions that substantially widen the powers of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to conduct spying and other operations within the US against American citizens.
Last week, several news outlets reported that the Justice Department had drafted new rules on intelligence gathering operations which it plans to ratify on October 1, the first day of the new fiscal year and one month before the November elections.
Although details of the draft have not been made publicly available, officials told the Associated Press (AP) that the changes give explicit permission to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans even if there is no basis for suspicion of criminal activity or allegations of wrongdoing. According to an August 20 report by the AP, officials speaking on condition of anonymity said “the new policy would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.”
Among factors the officials said could be used as the basis for spying, according to the AP, were “travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity and access to weapons or military training, along with the person’s race or ethnicity.”
The FBI would be authorized to conduct activities such as “long-term surveillance, interviewing neighbors and work-mates, recruiting informants and searching commercial databases for information on people.”
Four members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who were briefed on the new rules—Democrats Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island—wrote in an August 18 letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey that the new rules opened the way for “intrusive surveillance” against innocent Americans based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities.”
An August 22 editorial by the New York Times, citing comments of Senate staffers familiar with the new rules, reported that the FBI would be authorized to carry out “pretext interviews, in which agents do not honestly represent themselves while questioning a subject’s neighbors and work colleagues.”
cont... http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/fbi-a25.shtml
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Get er done
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i always thought cia and other agencies did this on the regular but when it gets the exposure like pat. act it just looks bad. i hate it.