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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/us/29manual.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/us/29manual.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print</a>
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October 29, 2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy
Concerns</b></font></h1><font size=3>By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/charlie_savage/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
CHARLIE SAVAGE</a><br><br>
WASHINGTON After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed
a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Federal Bureau of Investigation</a> began investigating whether a Somali
Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil. <br><br>
Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a
tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali
communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. The operation
unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic
intelligence-gathering rules. <br><br>
The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when
it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its
<a href="http://documents.nytimes.com/the-new-operations-manual-from-the-f-b-i">
“Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.”</a>; The disclosure of
the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been
given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era.<br><br>
In seeking the revised rules, the bureau said it needed greater
flexibility to hunt for would-be terrorists inside the United States. But
the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates.<br><br>
One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or
group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use
ethnicity or religion as a factor as long as it is not the only one
when selecting subjects for scrutiny. <br><br>
“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence
agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to
collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect
of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for
the
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/american_civil_liberties_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
American Civil Liberties Union</a>.<br><br>
But Valerie Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, said the bureau has
adequate safeguards to protect civil liberties as it looks for people who
could pose a threat. <br><br>
“Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or
group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up
to no good seriously miss the mark,” Ms. Caproni said. “The F.B.I. has
been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national
security not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar
screen.”<br><br>
The manual authorizes agents to open an “assessment” to “proactively”
seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in
national security threats.<br><br>
Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular
factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary
or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is
“difficult to define.”<br><br>
Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like
sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following
and photographing targets in public.<br><br>
F.B.I. agents previously had similar powers when looking for potential
criminal activity. But until the recent changes, greater justification
was required to use the powers in national security investigations
because they receive less judicial oversight.<br><br>
If agents turn up something specific to suggest wrongdoing, they can
begin a “preliminary” or “full” investigation and use additional
techniques, like wiretapping. But even if agents find nothing, the
personal information they collect during assessments can be retained in
F.B.I. databases, the manual says. <br><br>
When selecting targets, agents are permitted to consider political speech
or religion as one criterion. The manual tells agents not to engage in
racial profiling, but it authorizes them to take into account “specific
and relevant ethnic behavior” and to “identify locations of concentrated
ethnic communities.”<br><br>
Farhana Khera, president of Muslim Advocates, said the F.B.I. was
harassing Muslim-Americans by singling them out for scrutiny. Her group
was among those that sued the bureau to release the manual.<br><br>
“We have seen even in recent months the revelation of the F.B.I. going
into mosques not where they have a specific reason to believe there is
criminal activity, but as ‘agent provocateurs’ who are trying to incite
young individuals to join a purported terror plot,” Ms. Khera said. “We
think the F.B.I. should be focused on following actual leads rather than
putting entire communities under the microscope.”<br><br>
Ms. Caproni, the F.B.I. lawyer, denied that the bureau engages in racial
profiling. She cited the search for signs of the Somali group,
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/al-shabab/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Al Shabaab</a>, linked to the Minneapolis teenager to illustrate why the
manual allows agents to consider ethnicity when deciding where to look.
In that case, the bureau worried that other such teenagers might return
from Somalia to carry out domestic operations. <br><br>
Agents are trained to ignore ethnicity when looking for groups that have
no ethnic tie, like environmental extremists, she said, but “if you are
looking for Al Shabaab, you are looking for Somalis.”<br><br>
Among the manual’s safeguards, agents must use the “least intrusive
investigative method that effectively accomplishes the operational
objective.” When infiltrating an organization, agents cannot sabotage its
“legitimate social or political agenda,” nor lead it “into criminal
activity that otherwise probably would not have occurred.”<br><br>
Portions of the manual were redacted, including pages about “undisclosed
participation” in an organization’s activities by agents or informants,
“requesting information without revealing F.B.I. affiliation or the true
purpose of a request,” and using “ethnic/racial demographics.” <br><br>
The attorney general guidelines for F.B.I. operations date back to 1976,
when a Congressional investigation by the so-called Church Committee
uncovered decades of illegal domestic spying by the bureau on groups
perceived to be subversive including civil rights, women’s rights and
antiwar groups under the bureau’s longtime former director,
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/j_edgar_hoover/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
J. Edgar Hoover</a>, who died in 1972. <br><br>
The Church Committee proposed that rules for the F.B.I.’s domestic
security investigations be written into federal law. To forestall
legislation, the attorney general in the Ford administration, Edward
Levi, issued his own guidelines that established such limits
internally.<br><br>
Since then, administrations of both parties have repeatedly adjusted the
guidelines. <br><br>
In September 2008, Attorney General
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/michael_b_mukasey/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Michael B. Mukasey</a> signed the new F.B.I. guidelines that expanded
changes begun under his predecessor,
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/john_ashcroft/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
John Ashcroft</a>, after the Sept. 11 attacks. The guidelines went into
effect and the F.B.I. completed the manual putting them into place last
December.<br><br>
There are no signs that the current attorney general,
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/eric_h_holder_jr/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Eric H. Holder Jr.</a>, plans to roll back the changes. A spokeswoman
said Mr. Holder was monitoring them “to see how well they work” and would
make refinements if necessary.<br><br>
The F.B.I., however, is revising the manual. Ms. Caproni said she was
taking part in weekly high-level meetings to evaluate suggestions from
agents and expected about 20 changes. <br><br>
Many proposals have been requests for greater flexibility. For example,
some agents said requirements that they record in F.B.I. computers every
assessment, no matter how minor, were too time consuming. But Ms. Caproni
said the rule aided oversight and would not be changed.<br><br>
She also said that the F.B.I. takes seriously its duty to protect freedom
while preventing terrorist attacks. “I don’t like to think of us as a spy
agency because that makes me really nervous,” she said. “We don’t want to
live in an environment where people in the United States think the
government is spying on them. That’s an oppressive environment to live in
and we don’t want to live that way.”<br><br>
What the public should understand, she continued, is that the F.B.I. is
seeking to become a more intelligence-driven agency that can figure out
how best to deploy its agents to get ahead of potential threats.<br><br>
“And to do that,” she said, “you need information.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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