Video: New FBI Manual Change Sparks Privacy Concerns - June 13, 2011
"The FBI is preparing new investigative guidelines for its agents that civil libertarians say would make it easier for agents to search commercial or law enforcement databases, conduct lie detector tests, search people's trash and conduct physical surveillance, sometimes without any suspicion of wrongdoing.
The FBI says the changes are merely fine-tuning of existing rules.
The new guidelines are still under review inside the law enforcement agency. They will be contained in a new edition of the FBI manual, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.
"The proposed changes primarily clarify and enhance the definitions of terms and procedures" already in use, FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in a statement. "Each proposed change has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of the tools our employees need to accomplish their mission, the possible risks associated with use of those tools and the controls that are in place. Overall, this is ... not any major change."
Civil liberties groups disagreed.
"What we find troubling" is that the FBI is loosening requirements of 3-year-old guidelines which private groups feel already contain "very broad authority," said Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates. Khera's organization was among those receiving an FBI briefing late last month on the proposed updates to the guidelines.
"What they shared with us doesn't allay our concerns and raises new ones for us," Khera said.
The impending set of guidelines "adds more techniques and further rolls back oversight," said Emily Berman, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
In 2008, new guidelines formally created a category of investigation called an assessment in which the bureau can examine whether a person or group poses a national security or criminal threat without having any suspicion they have engaged in wrongdoing."
What a crock of horse$h!+
Wow… and this from the liberal Huffington Post~
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