'Unleashed and Unaccountable': FBI's Post-9/11 Abuse of Power

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/17-7



The FBI has abused its ever-widening post-9/11 powers to target immigrants, minorities, and political dissidents through secret surveillance and infiltration programs that trample constitutional rights and run roughshod over principles of fairness and justice, the ACLU finds in a breaking report released Tuesday.

Entitled “Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority (pdf),” this comprehensive report traces the explosion in the FBI's surveillance authority and reach over the past 12 years and tracks systemic violations of First and Fourth Amendment protections. As the NSA spying scandal continues to ricochet across the globe, the study paints an in-depth picture of how a political climate of permissiveness led to FBI abuse and overreach.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, Congress—backed by the Department of Justice and the White House—have expanded the Bureau's authority to survey and investigate Americans, invoking the threat of terrorism to pass legislation from the Patriot Act in 2001 to the FISA Amendments Act in 2008. In conjunction with these political developments, the FBI has revised its own internal guidelines and claimed the right, according to the report, to investigate and spy on U.S. people without reasonable suspicion.

What have these expanding authorities meant in practice?

The report outlines a litany of abuses over the past 12 years, including a racial mapping program, in which FBI officials gathered demographic information on people in the U.S. and mapped communities according to their racial and ethnic composition. Abuses also included warrant-less wiretaps, as well as FBI accessing of private information from financial, telecommunications, and credit companies with no judicial approval. As recently exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the FBI also tracked phone calls, invoking the Patriot Act.