The New York Times reports that the U.S Government has given the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its roughly 14,000 agents substantially enhanced powers to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention, even when the FBI might otherwise lack probable cause warranting such surveillance.
The FBI’s new abilities will add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity. But activists are concerned that civil liberties will once again be trampled upon, signaling a further retreat from the values American politicians established over the last 200 years. “Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. 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 F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.
But Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.
“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”