F.B.I. Given Broader Authority to Monitor the Public

The Justice Department said today that it would immediately loosen restrictions on the F.B.I., giving the bureau broad new powers to go after terrorists without violating the United States Constitution.

Rules That Limited F.B.I. Domestic Spying Were Rooted in Earlier Era, Not in Law

Smile, you’re on candid camera — permitting the FBI to monitor the internet is one of the central features of the new rules.

With the substitution of the Internet for the newsstand, that is essentially what Attorney General John Ashcroft now proposes to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do.

If the Supreme Court was unwilling to bar a similar practice in 1972, there is little reason to think a challenge would succeed today.

Indeed, the restrictions under which the F.B.I. has operated for three decades were self-imposed. Congressional pressure, lawsuits, scandals and a public outcry played a role in the bureau’s vow to limit domestic surveillance to situations in which criminal conduct was suspected. But the restrictions were not enforceable in court and were grounded in what might be called constitutional values, rather than actual law.

Civil libertarians largely acknowledge that the Justice Department is free to revise its own guidelines, but they say that the knowledge that political activity is being monitored by the government will chill the kinds of unrestrained discussions that are central to American democracy, with no appreciable benefits. NY Times