Mukasey Puts COINTELPRO Back On The Table

[reprehensor]

Every once in a while, the Washington Post actually prints something of note. Yesterday, they published this article, Rule Changes Would Give FBI Agents Extensive New Powers. Previously, the FBI was required to have a case before they started screwing around with you. Under Mukasey's "New Rules", we now have a situation ripe for abuse. The Justice Department is currently working out the wording for placing "undisclosed participants" in organizations;

The changes would give the FBI's more than 12,000 agents the ability at a much earlier stage to conduct physical surveillance, solicit informants and interview friends of people they are investigating without the approval of a bureau supervisor. Such techniques are currently available only after FBI agents have opened an investigation and developed a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed or that a threat to national security is developing...

The overhaul touches on several sensitive areas. It would allow, for example, agents to interview people in the United States about foreign intelligence cases without warrants or prior approval of their supervisors. It also would rewrite 1976 guidelines established after Nixon-era abuses that restrict the FBI's authority to intervene in times of civil disorder and to infiltrate opposition groups...

Monitoring conversations between informants who agree to wear recording devices and subjects of investigations, which now requires the permission of an assistant U.S. attorney, could occur without a prosecutor's approval...

The new approach would relax some of those requirements and would expand the investigative techniques that agents could use to include deploying informants...

Policy guidance for FBI agents and informants who work as "undisclosed participants" in organizations is still being written, the officials said yesterday.

Just in time for the November elections. How charming.

(Unfamiliar with COINTELPRO? Check out the Wikipedia page.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO