Before Attorney General Mukasey even made the new FBI guidelines public, DDF engaged in a grassroots campaign and behind the scenes advocacy to forestall the worst provisions. Our main concerns were that the new guidelines would allow agents to investigate people based on their First Amendment activities and open the door to racial profiling. Unfortunately the new guidelines, which take affect on December 1, allow FBI agents to investigate individuals and groups for whom they have no factual basis to suspect of wrongdoing. The guidelines explicitly allow agents to infiltrate peaceful groups in advance of demonstrations, and do not prohibit agents from investigating people based on their race, religion or ethnicity.
The guidelines cannot be allowed to stand, and it will be a top priority of DDF in the coming year to ensure that they are changed. We are exploring different strategies with our coalition partners, including working with the Obama administration on quick fixes to the guidelines, a thorough review of the guidelines and current FBI practices, and possibly a legislative charter for the FBI (remember that Attorney General Levy wrote the original guidelines in 1976 to preclude congressional action).
UPDATE: The FBI has refused to release the Operational Guidelines, which detail the procedures and standards for implementing domestic intelligence investigations. Read more here…
The DOJ Office of Inspector General has completed a new audit of the FBI's terrorist watch list. You won't be surprised to learn that they found the list to be full of errors. Not only are subjects of terrorism investigations left off the list, but in 72% of cases, the FBI neglected to remove names from the list in a timely manner. The audit concludes that there is a 35% error rate.
The use of National Security Letters (NSLs) is on the rise again. According to a Justice Department report issued to Congress in May, the FBI used 24,744 NSLs to investigate over 7000 Americans last year. That's up from 16,804 NSLs issued in 2007. Read more here…
Most Wanted Terrorist List
On April 21, 2009, the FBI added Daniel Andreas San Diego, an animal rights activist, to their Most Wanted Terrorists List. An FBI news release pointed out that San Diego is the first "domestic terrorist" to be added to the list. He is accused of participating in the planting of two bombs in Northern California in 2003 that caused property damage but no human injuries. There have been no new developments in his case, so the timing of this announcement, in the middle of the uproar about the Rightwing Extremism report, has raised a few eyebrows in the animal rights movement as well as in the media.
