Do you want FBI agents following you or your neighbors into your churches, synagogues or mosques and documenting what goes on there? Recently released documents indicate that FBI agents have been spying on innocent people under guidelines relaxed by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Ashcroft restructured these guidelines -- without consultation with Congress -- to allow FBI agents to spy on religious and political activity even if there was no suspicion of criminal activity.
Ashcroft's new guidelines revoked long-standing protections from government abuse and there is evidence that the FBI and local police are using this opportunity to spy on environmental, political and faith-based groups. This spying is not only unnecessary but also invasive of personal privacy. The police should not spy on individuals because they attended a rally supporting better funding for their child's school or they expressed discontent with the government's policy toward Sudan.
Post-September 11 analysis demonstrated that the FBI had the necessary information to prevent the World Trade Center attacks, but had not used it. These new guidelines allow the FBI to sweep in more information about more people, even if they have not done anything wrong. Now the FBI will have to analyze this additional useless information, even though it has demonstrated its inability to process the information it already has.
New legislation will soon be introduced to combat this unnecessary expansion of government powers. This important legislation would put critical protections back in place and ensure that the FBI would only be able to investigate you if they have reason to believe that you are involved in criminal or terrorist activity.
Take Action! Urge your Members of Congress to support and cosponsor legislation that would reign in these dangerous and unnecessary powers.
New powers are not needed.
The old guidelines never prohibited the FBI from entering mosques, other houses of worship or political meetings, so long as there was reason to believe evidence of a crime or terrorism would be found. The new guidelines allow government agents to attend peaceful gatherings to spy and to possibly create extensive dossiers on individual participants.
A track record of abuse.
The original Attorney General guidelines were implemented in response to FBI excesses in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In fact, between 1960 and 1974, the FBI kept files on one million Americans, and investigated 500,000 so-called ""subversives"" such as Martin Luther King, Jr. -- all without a single court conviction. By rolling back the protections in the original guidelines, we are re-creating a situation we know from experience resulted in abuse.
Misdirection of proper resources.
The new guidelines allow the FBI to sweep in more information about more people, even if they haven't done anything wrong. Agents must then sift through all this useless information to try and find the needle in the haystack. The result is that we are less safe because the FBI will not be able to analyze the vast amounts of information and less free because the FBI will now be spying on innocent religious and political activity.
TAKE ACTION!