It’s official: the FBI can exercise surveillance over people even when there is no evidence or particular suspicion that a crime has been, is being or will be committed.
This came recently from the top cop himself: FBI director Robert Mueller. Mueller was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the failure of many of his agents to pass a test about the rules governing surveillance; the discussion broadened to include the question of when current law allows them to exercise it.
Among those present was Committee member Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who, let it be added parenthetically, is not exactly the darling of Washington’s national security hawks. In 2005, after delving into an FBI report that detailed abuses of prisoners at Guantanamo during interrogations, Durbin stirred up a storm of press with a speech on the Senate floor in which he compared the interrogators to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.”
At the hearing on July 28, Mueller told Durbin and the Committee that his agents could not exercise surveillance in the absence of “suspicion.” Later, however, he wrote Durbin a note amending what he had said. According to the Associated Press, Mueller said in his note to Durbin that the FBI “must have a proper purpose before conducting surveillance, but suspicion of wrongdoing is not required …”
Civil rights groups are alarmed, not only because Mueller seemed to imply that FBI agents could rifle through people’s information on mere fishing expeditions, but because he himself seemed uncertain about agency standards. That, together with reports that agents cheated on exams about surveillance rules, has groups like the Northampton-based Bill of Rights Defense Committee (www.bordc.org) on the qui vive, writing to Congress and monitoring court cases to be sure national security concerns don’t overwhelm constitutional protections.
“The Fourth Amendment prohibits ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ and specifically requires judicially authorized warrants based on ‘probable cause’ that ‘particularly describe the place to be searched.’ For centuries, courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment to require individualized suspicion for searches,” BORDC director and civil rights attorney Shahid Buttar wrote in an article on Huffington Post. BORDC is also looking into secret FBI rules related to undercover and infiltration operations.
