- The ability to go through household trash of anyone to find things that will “pressure that person to assist in a government investigation.”
- Conducting a lie detector test on an individual, again with no evidence required.
- Using surreptitious surveillance squads on anyone repeatedly. Currently they are only allowed to do so once.
- Covert “proactive” infiltration of groups – FBI agents can attend up to five meetings of any group with no evidence that said group has done anything wrong without disclosing their identity before some unknown rules on “undisclosed participation” go into effect. These rules are not public.
Basically the new policies expand the powers of the FBI to investigate individuals for no reason with fewer oversights. Now I know some people will feel like this is good. The FBI needs to be able to operate freely in order to enforce the law and find bad people and all that. But the FBI aren’t always the best judge of right and wrong. There are reasons why we have constitutional protections. George Zornack mentioned a case filed by the ACLU from 2007 claiming that:
...an FBI agent infiltrated several California mosques and ‘indiscriminately collect[ed] personal information on hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent Muslim Americans in Southern California.’ The suit charges that the agent collected info on the sex lives of mosque members and attempted to provide them illegal drugs, and that his rhetoric about ‘jihad and armed conflict’ disturbed their prayer services.
Environmental activists and groups have also been under an odd amount of increased surveillance. Why do we need to give up civil liberties to protect polluting corporations?
As much as I appreciate a lot of what President Obama has done and is continuing to work to do I am flummoxed at his lack of action against the director of the F.B.I., Robert Mueller. It also makes me angry that my representatives haven’t done anything about it, nor did they seem to be concerned about the recent abuses of power when Mueller went before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.
These are the types of things I feel like we need a nation of Marcus’ to fight! What do you guys think?
These new FBI policies are irrational! How can our government make laws and then allow a government organization to break them? I was thinking about how these new FBI policies would affect our privacy as library patrons. Back in 1987, the FBI tried to implement the Library Awareness Program. The program was implemented to track “suspicious looking foreigners” through various library services such as interlibrary loan, database searches and circulation records. Due to the increased number of visits to libraries and inquiries by FBI agents, the ALA decided to create a policy that enforced confidentiality of personal patron information. (Intellectual Freedom Manual, p. 271) This policy called “Policy concerning Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information about Library Users” was adopted in 1991 and last revised in 2005.
ReplyDeleteDo you think the FBI’s new “creepy” policies have the power to override what ALA has put in place to protect library users?
To paraphrase George Orwell, "All government agencies are equal, but some are more equal than others...." This seems to be what's happening with our "protecting" forces like the FBI. While other agencies' hands are tied, more and more freedom is given to the FBI, with fewer and fewer checks and balances in place. And yes, I think that if the FBI's policies don't already allow them to override ALA protections yet, they soon will at the rate they're getting power.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, as a side note, I'd love to see the FBI going through our trash, since we usually have disposable shop towels soiled by hairballs and dog vomit, 2-3 grocery bags of used cat litter mixed in with our food scraps and Kleenex (my sisters have big-time allergies). Very few, if any, of our sensitive documents end up in the actual trash--unless we use the shredded stuff as animal bedding or litter box liners eventually. :)