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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents — allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.The FBI soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.The FBI recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing."Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse," German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the FBI had improperly used "national security letters" to obtain information like people’s phone bills.
Heard a snippet on Fox that sounded like they will be able to make determination who is a potential threat group to surveil. By the wording the first group that came to mind was......Masons?And probably their DeMoley squires.
OverviewThe Federal Bureau of Investigations has rewritten its own operations manual, giving its agents more autonomy than ever to conduct low-level searches without a paper trail. ...Undocumented database searches: Right now, agents can search commercial and law enforcement databases for any individual or organization they want, even without real evidence of wrongdoing, but they must officially open a so-called assessment inquiry. "Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision," ..."Undisclosed participation" in organizations: The special rules governing agents' and informants' attendance of meetings and surreptitious participation in organizations on which they are gathering information haven't been made public. But the new rules clearly state that agents or informants can freely attend five meetings of an organization before those rules apply.
Any anti Obama group out there is a potential target.