FBI Given Broad Authority to Monitor Public Activities

The Justice Department on Thursday gave FBI agents sweeping new powers to monitor the Internet, mosques, rallies and other once-restricted areas in search of terrorists, sparking immediate debate and condemnation from groups that say the changes hark back to an era of civil rights abuses at the FBI.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, announcing the most radical rewrite of the Justice Department’s investigative code since the 1970s, said the changes should unshackle the hands of thousands of FBI agents who have been subject to overly burdensome regulations.

Civil rights groups and Arab American advocates said the FBI’s expanded power to initiate investigations and spy on citizens without evidence of a crime smacked of a “Big Brother” mind-set. But Ashcroft and President Bush said no one should fear any infringement of their civil liberties because of the revamped guidelines.

“We intend to honor our Constitution and respect the freedoms that we hold so dear,” Bush told reporters. But at the same time, he said, “We want to make sure that we do everything we can to prevent a further attack--to protect America.”

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who just a day earlier announced a broad reorganization of the bureau in the face of mounting criticism over its failure to pursue pre-Sept. 11 terrorist warnings, said the changes reflect “important steps to help remove unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles to the effective investigation of terrorist cases.”

The FBI’s more than 11,000 agents have been generally prohibited, for instance, from surfing the Internet to look for bomb-making sites or attending public rallies where a suspect might be present unless it was part of a specific criminal investigation.

Those restrictions grew out of civil rights abuses in the 1960s and 1970s when then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used investigators to conduct domestic surveillance on controversial figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers.

But Ashcroft said the previous restrictions have given terrorists a “competitive advantage” in outfoxing federal agents.

As a result, he issued guidelines Thursday--effective immediately--that significantly loosen the reins on federal agents and give them broader discretion to initiate investigations and track down leads.

Among other reforms, FBI agents in the bureau’s 56 field offices around the country will now be able to surf the Web in search of terrorist material, use commercial data-mining services on the Internet, attend any event open to the public and extend preliminary investigations for up to a year without approval from Washington, officials said.

“It’s definitely a top-to-bottom [overhaul]. The changes are dramatic, not only in terms of substance but in terms of tone,” said a senior Justice Department official who asked not to be identified.

Critics charged that the guidelines mark a significant curtailment of civil rights for law-abiding Americans, allowing the FBI to go on fishing expeditions with little or no evidence. Some critics accused the Bush administration of using the issue to divert attention from the FBI’s Sept. 11 intelligence failures.

“Apparently, Atty. Gen. Ashcroft wants to get the FBI back in the business of spying on religious and political organizations,” said Margaret Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the decision “threatens core civil liberties guaranteed under the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

And Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties group, said the FBI already had the ability to conduct extensive monitoring activities given reasonable suspicions.

“The purpose of this [order] seems to me to simply eliminate all of the existing review requirements, which were put in place to avoid the political spying abuses of the past,” Martin said. “The attorney general seems to be saying, ‘Make a list of anyone attending a particular mosque in the name of preventing terrorism.’ ”

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, asked: “Where are the checks and balances?

“We’re certainly in support of any effort to undermine terrorist activities in this country,” he said. “But we feel the approach of those efforts have been directed toward law-abiding U.S. citizens who happen to be of Arab or Muslim backgrounds, and if history is any indication, based on the almost unlimited powers given to the FBI back in the ‘60s, this won’t be pleasant.”

The guidelines may also increase months of tensions between the Justice Department and FBI detractors in Congress, particularly Democrats.

Several lawmakers promised that the changes--which do not require congressional approval--will be closely scrutinized.

A Senate aide who asked not to be identified said some members are irked that while Mueller gave them a closed-door briefing last week previewing his plans for the FBI reorganization, Congress got no advance warning about Ashcroft’s overhaul of the investigative guidelines. “That’s par for the course with this attorney general,” the aide said.

The guidelines, which the Justice Department first began considering last fall after the Sept. 11 attacks, come after weeks of mounting criticism over the FBI’s handling of terrorist investigations. Criticism has focused largely on FBI headquarters’ failure to heed the warnings of field agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis last summer concerning their suspicions about terrorists studying at local flight training schools.

New allegations surfaced Thursday from an FBI agent who worked in counter-terrorism in Chicago in the 1990s. The agent, Robert G. Wright Jr., charged at a news conference in Washington that FBI officials “repeatedly thwarted and obstructed” his efforts to track Islamic terrorist fund-raising in the United States and then demoted him to a desk job.

The FBI declined to comment on Wright’s specific allegations but noted that the bureau had spent “many thousands of investigative hours” before and after Sept. 11 tracking terrorist financing in Chicago, and that the probe drew no direct links to the hijackings.

The new guidelines apply primarily to FBI terrorist investigations, but there are also provisions that give agents in other federal agencies in the Justice Department and across the federal government broadened discretion to use confidential informants and consensual monitoring of conversations, officials said.

Justice Department officials said they were seeking to “clarify” previous department guidelines that offered sometimes murky restrictions and were interpreted in practice as blanket prohibitions on such things as surfing the Internet or attending public events.

The new guidelines on FBI conduct specifically authorize “visiting places and events which are open to the public for the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activity.”

Ashcroft, asked how that regulation would apply to mosques and other religious institutions, said that “if a place is a place to which the public is invited and in which the public is welcome, it is a place in which the FBI is welcome.”

Justice Department officials stressed, however, that the FBI would retain records of such visits only if they generated information relating to criminal activity.

“The abuses that once have been alleged about the FBI decades ago, about the keeping of files or records about prominent figures in this country, would not be allowed either under the guidelines or under the statutes regarding privacy, which are incorporated in the guidelines,” Ashcroft said.

FBI officials in Los Angeles declined to comment on the new procedures. But agents elsewhere said the changes are likely to be met enthusiastically by investigators in the field.

Previous guidelines were “unreasonably artificial and impractical,” said a veteran agent who asked not to be identified.

Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this report.