Civil liberties under threat: FBI to get more power under new rules

Proposed new rules that will give the FBI more power have US civil liberty groups concerned.

The US Justice Department wants to apply the same rules to criminal investigations that it brings to terrorism cases and the collection of foreign intelligence. The new rules are expected to come into effect on October 1.

Under the new rules, agents would not require a bureau supervisor's say-so to go ahead with surveillance, solicit informants and interview people-of-interest. Customarily agents usually only employed such methods once they had opened a file and established there were reasonable grounds to believe a crime had been committed.

Using informants to monitor conversations with recording devices, won't require a prosecutor's okay - with the exception of high profile cases.

The American Civil Liberties Union are concerned about the ramifications of these changes:

" ... the rewritten rules had been drafted in a way to allow the FBI to begin surveillance without factual evidence to back it up.

It (ACLU) said that under the new guidelines, a person's race or ethnic background could be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU believes will institute racial profiling as a matter of policy." (Reuters source)

ACLU Washington legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said: "Agents will be given unparalleled leeway to investigate Americans without proper suspicion, and that will inevitably result in constitutional violations."

This also from Anthony Romero, ACLU's executive director:

"Issuing guidelines that permit racial profiling the day after the 9/11 anniversary and in the midst of a historic presidential campaign is typical Bush administration stagecraft designed to exploit legitimate security concerns for partisan political purposes."

Tags: FBI, new rules, ACLU, Anthony Romero, US Justice Department, civil liberties