U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules[Domestic Spying]

The Washington Post ^ | 16 Aug 2008 | Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson

[BGHater]

More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

[BGHater]

'On the day the police proposal was put forward, the White House announced it had updated Reagan-era operating guidelines for the U.S. intelligence community. The revised Executive Order 12333 established guidelines for overseas spying and called for better sharing of information with local law enforcement. It directed the CIA and other spy agencies to "provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel" to support state and local authorities. '

Oh Joy. Obama/Hillary is gonna love this.

[randomhero97]

Yeah, but if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. /s

[DarkWaters]

And yet when we do find actual terror related incidences, the recent container of cyanide, the fellow who blew himself up outside of a college stadium a few years ago, some driving into crowds, a kid flying his plain into a building in Florida not to long after 9/11, OK City bombing involving a third person, etc. we get the mantra that their is no evidence that this is terror related(especially of the Islamic variety) or its just domestic and quickly swept under the rug. Its all very contradictory and even worse when you consider that many of the bureaucracies in the government are leftist or run by leftists and we have seen the fruits of their labor during the coarse of the 20th Century.

[null and void]

Citizen, there have been NO terrorist related incidents.

[libertylover]

However, Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the proposed rule may be misunderstood as permitting police to collect intelligence even when no underlying crime is suspected

Right. The cops are so underworked they gather information just for the heck of it.