DOJ to you: "What COINTELPRO? Bitches."

There may come a time
When youll be tired
As tired as a dream that wants to die
And further to fly
Further to fly

"Further to Fly"
Simon and Garfunkel

Just a little something in case you think that I am imply fixated on fiscal short bus that is running around and around the block. Oh no. In an effort to avoid confusion amongst agents who are bound by rules of conduct based on the type of investigation that they officially declare, DOJ has declared that for the assessment of a criminal threat, the FBI can:

• Conduct surveillance without an otherwise required court order

• Obtain grand jury subpoenas for personal telephone and e-mail accounts

• Recruit informants for feeding information about a group or person to the bureau

• Examine records maintained by federal, state and local government agencies, which are typically not accessible to the public, like police databases profiling past criminal suspects.

Groups or individuals targeted for an assessment may simply resemble to an agent a risk to public safety without any advance information indicating that was the case. It's not clear, then, how the bureau determines what groups or people should be spied upon if they haven't broken any laws and whether that process is arbitrary.

From The Center for Investigative Reporting:

In particular, the powers allow agents to "collect information relating to demonstration activities," according to the guidelines, for the purpose of protecting "public health and safety" before a major event, like the party conventions that occurred in St. Paul and Denver. The bureau can gather intelligence to determine where political demonstrators are lodging during the event, how they're traveling there, where demonstration activities are planned and how many people will attend, all without advanced proof that a national-security threat exists.

Agents can also access commercial databases containing large volumes of personal information on U.S. citizens, like those maintained by the private company ChoicePoint, which specializes in serving government agencies.

The fucking Attorney General of the US says:

"Under the new guidelines, the investigative steps that the FBI may take in a particular investigation will not be driven by irrelevant factors, such as the type of paperwork the agent uses to open the investigation," Mukasey told a crowd during an August anti-terrorism conference in Oregon. "The revisions also aim to eliminate distinctions in the existing rules that make it, in practice, harder to gather information about threats to the national security than it is to conduct 'ordinary' criminal investigations."

Think about what was said - irrelevant factors like the type of paperwork are the sort of important detail oriented things that a society's top law enforcement organization should be interested in. If a person can't get that right, why are they in a position of power to begin with?

These rules and laws were put into place on purpose after the DOJ proved again and again that they were incapable of not doing the Wrong Thing. COINTELPRO anybody?

Ugh. I have to go get some work done