For your perusal: The New FBI Operations Manual. "Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is “difficult to define.”
posted by Xurando on Oct 29, 2009 - 16 comments

Leaving office, President Bush claimed "that he took 'a deliberate and comprehensive approach' to preventing terrorism that combined military action overseas with strong defensive measures at home."

[As early as 2002] "We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt... Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism."
[. . . . FBI Director Robert] "Mueller actually circumvented the Justice Department and the OMB to get resources. But he was shut down" by the [Bush A]dministration. [. . . . Testifying in October 2004, ] Chris Swecker, then assistant director of the criminal investigation division said ... "The potential impact of mortgage fraud on financial institutions in the stock market is clear. If fraudulent practices become systemic within the mortgage industry and mortgage fraud is allowed to become unrestrained, it will ultimately place financial institutions at risk and have adverse effects on the stock market."

posted by orthogonality on Jan 29, 2009 - 71 comments

Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls. You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.
posted by Postroad on Mar 5, 2007 - 29 comments

The FBI knows you're reading MetaFilter. [WashPost link]
posted by digaman on Nov 7, 2005 - 96 comments

The FBI has been given increased surveillance powers without court oversight under the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, which was signed into law on the day Saddam was captured. The law was recently used to have hotels and airlines in Las Vegas turn over guest and passenger names and information for the holiday period.
posted by homunculus on Jan 7, 2004 - 35 comments

Al Gore claims the Bush administration is not helping America, but hurting it by focusing on all the wrong things. Gore:The administration is still not investing in local government training and infrastructures where they could make the biggest difference. The first responder community is still being shortchanged. In many cases, fire and police still don’t have the communications equipment to talk to each other. The CDC and local hospitals are still nowhere close to being ready for a biological weapons attack. The administration has still failed to address the fundamental disorganization and rivalries of our law enforcement, intelligence and investigative agencies. In particular, the critical FBI-CIA coordination, while finally improved at the top, still remains dysfunctional in the trenches. The constant violations of civil liberties promote the false impression that these violations are necessary in order to take every precaution against another terrorist attack. But the simple truth is that the vast majority of the violations have not benefited our security at all; to the contrary, they hurt our security.
posted by skallas on Nov 10, 2003 - 29 comments

Special Agent Crowley Speaks Up (NYTimes link , normal rules apply) Ladies like this are the real heroes in our country and she has something to say before Congress about the new Bush agency. Ms. Dowd agrees and said, "The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government."
posted by nofundy on Jun 11, 2002 - 8 comments

President Bush was told that Osama bin Laden might be plotting to hijack U.S. passenger planes well before September 11th. The warning was never made public. AP reported earlier this month that FBI headquarters did not act on a memo last July from its Arizona office warning there were a large number of Arabs seeking pilot, security and airport operations training. Said a spokeman for Sen. Bob Graham, Senate Intelligence Committee chair: "It represents a failure to connect the dots."
posted by tranquileye on May 15, 2002 - 36 comments

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: GORE MOLE SUSPECTED TO HAVE INFILTRATED BUSH CAMPAIGN; FBI MOVES IN; DEBATE PREP TAPE EXPOSED BREACH This could be big. I remember when I read about the whole Moncia dress incident on the Drudge Report and look what happened... I hope to god it is not true, I couldn't stand Bush winning because of something like this.

PS, don't yell at me for the caps, it's Drudge. What do you expect?
posted by Brilliantcrank on Sep 22, 2000 - 5 comments