Legal Commentary

Mueller Testifies About FBI Agents Cheating on Surveillance Test

By Jeralyn

One would hope that FBI agents are familiar with guidelines for conducting surveillance and opening files on people without evidence they have committed a crime. Apparently, that's in doubt. The Inspector General is investigating whether hundreds of FBI agents cheated on a test about the guidelines.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress on Wednesday that he does not know how many of his agents cheated on an important exam on the bureau's policies, an embarrassing revelation that raises questions about whether the FBI knows its own rules for conducting surveillance on Americans.

Even Mueller got tripped up on the rules today. [More...]

He told Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that the FBI cannot conduct surveillance unless it suspects wrongdoing. FBI rules require no such standard. They allow agents to conduct surveillance proactively, without any evidence that a crime has been committed.

After the hearing, the FBI said, Mueller sent a note to Durbin saying he misspoke. The FBI must have a proper purpose before conducting surveillance, but suspicion of wrongdoing is not required, he said.

In related news, the ACLU has asked the FBI in 29 states and Washington, D.C. to turn over records related to the agency's collection and use of race and ethnicity data in local communities (data mapping):

According to an FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about and create maps of so-called "ethnic-oriented" businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations. While some racial and ethnic data collection by some agencies might be helpful in lessening discrimination, the FBI's attempt to collect and map demographic data using race-based criteria for targeting purposes invites unconstitutional racial profiling by law enforcement, says the ACLU.

"The FBI's mapping of local communities and businesses based on race and ethnicity, as well as its ability to target communities for investigation based on supposed racial and ethnic behaviors, raises serious civil liberties concerns," said Michael German, ACLU policy counsel and former FBI agent. "Creating a profile of a neighborhood for criminal law enforcement or domestic intelligence purposes based on the ethnic makeup of the people who live there or the types of businesses they run is unfair, un-American and will certainly not help stop crime."

The 2008 FBI Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide (DIOG) lay out the FBI's ability to collect, use and map racial and ethnic data in order to assist the FBI's "domain awareness" and "intelligence analysis" activities. (See starting at page 44 here).

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 28, 2010 (boomark / email).