Alberto Gonzales? John Ashcroft? Our Aggressively Abrogated civil liberties? Alligators All Around?

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald interviewed Mike German, policy counsel for the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office, about the FBI's new guidelines that would give it even more power to spy on innocent Americans. Mike got to take peek at the new guidelines — the FBI hasn't made them public — and blogged about FBI director Robert Mueller's hearings before the House and Senate Judiciary committees in mid-September. He says in the interview:

When investigating Americans for criminal work, the only way to protect innocent people is to make sure the FBI has some level, some facts based on some reasonable belief that they're doing something wrong…what these guidelines do is remove the need for any information, so the FBI doesn’t have to have any information that somebody's doing something bad…to begin an investigation. It's really a quite extraordinary power grab.

I spy: An abuse of power.

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