Yes, they do.
Here’s a message from the ACLU, describing another of the federal government’s ceaseless quests for more power over the lives of law-abiding citizens:
You probably wouldn’t expect that FBI agents would want to dig through your trash unless they had a real good reason. And you surely wouldn’t want them following you and gathering information about you from commercial databases and local police files unless they had some suspicion you were doing something wrong.
But, according to The New York Times, the FBI — despite a stunning record of abuses — will soon be giving its roughly 14,000 agents significant new surveillance powers.1
The loosened surveillance standards reportedly include giving agents more leeway to search commercial and police databases, to go through household trash, and to use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people the FBI doesn’t even suspect of wrongdoing.
In the waning days of the Bush administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey updated the guidelines governing FBI powers and essentially gave the FBI a blank check to open investigations of innocent Americans based on no meaningful suspicion of wrongdoing. Unbelievably, the FBI is now demanding even more power to investigate you, while refusing to provide information about how it is using its new powers.
As it is, the current guidelines set a dangerously low threshold for beginning an investigation or conducting surveillance about individuals or groups who are not suspected of any criminal activity.
The guidelines in place now also allow the FBI to collect, analyze and map racial and ethnic data about local communities, opening up the possibility that the FBI is engaging in unconstitutional racial profiling.
Please help us put the Obama administration on notice that we don’t want the FBI to have even more authority to engage in abuses. We need stronger safeguards against the FBI using race and religion as grounds for suspicion, not an expansion of unchecked surveillance powers.
The FBI could issue these dangerous new guidelines at any moment. Please act now to protect privacy and rein in abuses of the government’s far-reaching surveillance powers.
1. “F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds,” The New York Times, June 12, 2011.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html