2 articles on FBI spying in US
RMJon23
Surveillance tools raising concerns on civil liberties
By Larry Margasak, Associated Press | September 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration proposed guidelines yesterday
that would give the FBI more tools to assess national security and
foreign intelligence threats.
Agents would be permitted to use tactics that are now allowed only in
criminal cases: physical surveillance, recruitment of sources, and
"pretext interviews," in which the real purpose would not be revealed.
Justice Department and FBI senior officials briefed reporters on the
draft guidelines, but would not be quoted by name because they were
discussing proposals that are still likely to be changed.
Some Democratic senators and civil liberties groups have said the
proposals would allow Americans to be targeted in part because of
their race, ethnicity, or religion, and would allow them to be spied
on without any other basis for suspicion.
The American Civil Liberties Union quickly criticized the proposed
guidelines. The new rules would "give the FBI the ability to begin
surveillance without factual evidence, stating that a generalized
'threat' is enough to use certain techniques," the group said.
"Also under the new guidelines, a person's race or ethnic background
could be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU
believes will institute racial profiling as a matter of policy."
The administration officials acknowledged that those factors could
play a role in national security and foreign intelligence cases. But
they said they can already be considered under 2003 rules that are not
changing.
FBI Director Robert Mueller will testify about the guidelines in
Congress next week. The officials said they want the guidelines to
take effect Oct. 1.
According to the officials, the 2003 surveillance, recruitment, and
interview rules are too restrictive to allow the FBI to become a post-
Sept. 11 intelligence agency that can stop terrorists before they
strike.
"It is simply not responsible to say that race may never be taken into
account when conducting an investigation," said Brian Roehrkasse, a
Justice Department spokesman, who commented apart from yesterday's
briefing. "The reality is that a number of criminal and terror groups
have very strong ethnic associations."
He said the bureau cannot ignore La Cosa Nostra's Italian membership
or that Hezbollah is largely Lebanese, "any more than it could ignore
the identification of a bank robber as a short white male."
Existing guidelines do not allow an investigation based on factors
such as race alone; there must be some other evidence of a threat or
crime, the senior officials said at the briefing.
The threat assessment could trigger a formal investigation of
Americans in foreign intelligence and national security matters.
[According to an article from the WA. Post from Oct 4, the FBI got
what they wanted. Can't find the article online - it ran in the SF
Chronicle - but the title was "FBI to get new power for spying in the
US"...then, four days later: from the NYT: "Panel of Experts Urges
Study on Data Mining." Check that out]:
October 8, 2008
Study of Data Mining for Terrorists Is Urged
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — A federal panel of policy makers and scientific experts
urged a government-wide evaluation Tuesday of programs that sift
through databases looking for clues on terrorism, to determine whether
the programs are effective and legal.
The federal government has made aggressive use of so-called data-
mining tools since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as counterterrorism
officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to analyze records
on travel habits, calling patterns, e-mail use, financial transactions
and other data to pinpoint possible terrorist activity.
The National Security Agency’s program for wiretapping terror suspects
without warrants, the screening of suspicious airline passengers and
the Pentagon’s ill-fated Total Information Awareness program, shut
down by Congress in 2003 because of privacy concerns, have all relied
on aspects of data mining.
But in a 352-page government study released on Tuesday, a committee of
the National Research Council warned that successfully using these
tools to deter terrorism “will be extremely difficult to achieve”
because of legal, technological and logistical problems. It said a
haphazard approach to using such tools threatened both Americans’
privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs.
Mining through data patterns has been shown to work in commercial
settings to predict what kind of toothpaste people may buy and what
kind of movie they are likely to rent, or to detect casino card-
counters or those engaged in credit card fraud.
But there is little evidence to confirm that the techniques work to
actually find terrorists, despite the growing use in the last seven
years, committee members said. Part of the problem, they said, is that
the sample of known terrorists and actual attacks is so small that it
is difficult to establish patterns of suspicious behavior.
The push to accumulate enormous amounts of information has also
produced the risk of “a huge number of false leads” that could
implicate people with no actual connections to terrorism, the
committee said.
“More data does not mean better data,” said William J. Perry, the
former defense secretary who was co-chairman of the panel, with
Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering.
The National Research Council, a government-chartered nonprofit group,
set up the panel in 2005 to study data mining at the request of the
Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation.
Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor
who has studied data mining but was not involved in the study, said
one of the most important points made in the report — little
understood by the public — was to underscore the “fundamental
problems” in adapting commercial data-mining to the hunt for
terrorists. The committee, Mr. Blaze said, “has performed a real
public service.”
Timothy Edgar, the deputy for civil liberties in the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence at the White House, said his office
had begun reviewing data-mining programs “on an ad hoc basis,” partly
at the direction of Congress. But he said the committee’s
recommendations laying out a framework for legal and operational
concerns in a data-mining program could help to guide that effort.
“This is something the government could do in a more systematic way,”
Mr. Edgar said.
[SOOOOoooo: the techniques don't work to find "terrorists", but
they're gonna do it anyway...so I wonder WHO is considered the threat?
Gosh, I haven't any idea, do you guys? - rmjon23]
BS
> they're gonna do it anyway...so I wonder WHO is considered the threat?
> Gosh, I haven't any idea, do you guys? - rmjon23]
Let's just hope they're not looking for people who post snarky
commentary to usenet groups named for some martyred philosopher....
BS
FV, TX
RMJon23
BS, I count you as a friend, and I must say, as a friend, I take great
exception to this.
I thought I was being snotty, not snarky.
SNOTTY, with semantic overtones of being "phlegmatic" and therefore
("slowed by excess of phlegm or mucous," - my definition), and, ipso
facto, of no "real" danger to the State. They check in on guys like me
and find a wheezing man in a room piled full of books, the air
redolent of Vick's Vapo-Rub. Not exactly likely to interrupt a G-8
meeting, knowmsayin?
SNARKY, as I currently understand it, can get you 1.) accused of being
a dissident of some sort, which reduces to "terrorist" under the Chimp
Administration, or 2.) having ungainly propensity towards adopting
limey terminology, thereby affecting (AFFECTING) a psychological
distancing from the United Snakes.
Unless we're explicit and crystal in our clarification of terms, we
stand no chance.
PS: I still love you.
-rmjon23 da Berkeley
"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." - Wm
Gibson
http://www.enjoyfrance.com/images/stories/world/news/RAW.jpg
BS
> exception to this.
>
> I thought I was being snotty, not snarky.
> SNOTTY, with semantic overtones of being "phlegmatic" and therefore
> ("slowed by excess of phlegm or mucous," - my definition), and, ipso
> facto, of no "real" danger to the State. They check in on guys like me
> and find a wheezing man in a room piled full of books, the air
> redolent of Vick's Vapo-Rub. Not exactly likely to interrupt a G-8
> meeting, knowmsaying?
Well, you certainly are a mental decongestant, for me at least...
> SNARKY, as I currently understand it, can get you 1.) accused of being
> a dissident of some sort, which reduces to "terrorist" under the Chimp
> Administration, or 2.) having ungainly propensity towards adopting
> limey terminology, thereby affecting (AFFECTING) a psychological
> distancing from the United Snakes.
Did you learn these definitions while engaging in a snark hunt?
> Unless we're explicit and crystal in our clarification of terms, we
> stand no chance.
>
> PS: I still love you.
>
Same back at ya..
BS
FV, TX