"The American Civil Liberties Union" presenterar en lista på 10 punkter som FBI uträttat för att urholka de mänskliga rättigheterna i USA efter 9/11. (Övrig text på engelska.)
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1. USA Patriot Act Abuse
The recent revelation
about the FBI using the Patriot Act's "business records provision" to
track all U.S. telephone calls is only the latest in a long line of
abuse. Five Justice Department Inspector General audits documented
widespread FBI misuse of Patriot Act authorities (1,2,3,4,5), and a federal district court recently struck down
the National Security Letter (NSL) statute because of its
unconstitutional gag orders. The IG also revealed the FBI's unlawful use
of "exigent letters" that claimed false emergencies to get private information without NSLs, but in 2009 the Justice Department secretly re-interpreted the law
to allow the FBI to get this information without emergencies or legal
process. Congress and the American public need to know the full scope of
the FBI's spying on Americans under the Patriot Act and all other surveillance authorities enacted since 9/11, like the FISA Amendments Act that underlies the PRISM program.***
2. 2008 Amendments to the Attorney General's Guidelines
Attorney General Michael Mukasey re-wrote
the FBI's rulebook in the final months of the Bush administration,
giving FBI agents unfettered authority to investigate people without any
factual basis for suspecting wrongdoing. The 2008 Attorney General's Guidelines
created a new kind of intrusive investigation called an "assessment,"
which required no "factual predicate" before FBI agents could search
through government or commercial databases, conduct overt or covert FBI
interviews, and task informants to gather information about people or
infiltrate lawful organizations. In a two-year period from 2009 to 2011,
the FBI opened over 82,000
"assessments" of individuals or organizations, less than 3,500 of which
discovered information justifying further investigation.***
3. Racial and Ethnic Mapping
The 2008 Attorney General's Guidelines also authorized "domain
management assessments" which allow the FBI to map American communities
by race and ethnicity based on crass stereotypes about the crimes they
are likely to commit. FBI documents obtained by the ACLU show the FBI
mapped entire Chinese and Russian communities in San Francisco on the theory that they might commit organized crime, all Latino communities in New Jersey and Alabama because a street gang has Latino members, African Americans in Georgia to find "Black separatists," and Middle-Eastern communities in Detroit for terrorism investigations. The FBI's racial and ethnic mapping program is simply racial and religious profiling of entire communities.***
4. Unrestrained Data Collection and Data Mining
The FBI has claimed the authority to secretly sweep up voluminous
amounts of private information from data aggregators for data mining
purposes. In 2007 the FBI said it amassed databases containing 1.5 billion records, which were predicted
to grow to 6 billion records by 2012, or equal to "20 separate
‘records' for each man, woman and child in the United States." When
Congress sought information about one of these programs, the FBI refused to give the Government Accountability Office access. That program was temporarily defunded, but its successor, the FBI Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, currently has 360 staff members running 40 separate projects. Records show analysts are allowed to use data mining tools to establish "risk scores" for U.S. persons. A 2013 IG audit
questioned the task force's effectiveness, concluding it "did not
always provide FBI field offices with timely and relevant information."***
5. Suppressing Internal Dissent: The FBI War on Whistleblowers
The FBI is exempt from the Whistleblower Protection Act. Though the
law required it to establish internal mechanisms to protect
whistleblowers, it has a long history of retaliating against them. As a result, a 2009 IG report
found that 28 percent of non-supervisory FBI employees and 22 percent
of FBI supervisors at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels "never" reported
misconduct they have seen or heard about on the job. The FBI has also aggressively investigated whistleblowers from other agencies, leading to an unprecedented increase in Espionage Act prosecutions under the Obama administration, almost invariably targeting critics of government policies.***
6. Targeting Journalists
The FBI's overzealous pursuit of government whistleblowers has
resulted in the inappropriate targeting of journalists for
investigation, potentially chilling press freedoms. Recently, the FBI obtained
records from 21 telephone lines used by over 100 Associated Press
journalists, including the AP's main number in the U.S. House of
Representatives' press gallery. And an FBI search warrant affidavit claimed Fox News reporter James Rosen aided, abetted, or co-conspired in criminal activity
because of his news gathering activities, in an apparent attempt to
circumvent legal restrictions designed to protect journalists. In 2010,
the IG reported that the FBI unlawfully used an "exigent letter"
to obtain the telephone records of seven New York Times and Washington
Post reporters and researchers during a media leak investigation.***
7. Thwarting Congressional Oversight
The FBI has thwarted congressional oversight by withholding information, limiting or delaying
responses to members' inquiries, or worse, by providing false or
misleading information to Congress and the American public. Examples
include false information regarding FBI investigations of domestic advocacy groups, misleading information about the FBI's awareness of detainee abuse, and deceptive responses to questions about government surveillance authorities.***
8. Targeting First Amendment Activity
Several ACLU Freedom of Information Act requests have uncovered
significant evidence that the FBI has used its expanded authorities to
target individuals and organizations because of their participation in
First Amendment-protected activities. A 2010 IG report
confirmed the FBI conducted inappropriate investigations of domestic
advocacy groups engaged in environmental and anti-war activism, and
falsified public responses to hide this fact. Other FBI documents showed
FBI exploitation of community outreach programs to secretly collect information about law-abiding citizens, including a mosque outreach program specifically targeting American Muslims. Many of these abuses are likely a result of flawed FBI training materials and intelligence products that expressed anti-Muslim sentiments and falsely identified religious practices or other First Amendment activities as indicators of terrorism.***
9. Proxy Detentions
The FBI increasingly operates outside the U.S., where its
authorities are less clear and its activities much more difficult to
monitor. Several troubling cases indicate that during the Bush
administration the FBI requested, facilitated, and/or exploited the
arrests and detention of U.S. citizens by foreign governments, often
without charges, so they could be interrogated, sometimes tortured, then
interviewed by FBI agents. The ACLU represents two victims of such
activities. Amir Meshal
was arrested at the Kenya border by a joint U.S., Kenyan, and Ethiopian
task force in 2007, subjected to more than four months of detention,
and transferred between three different East African countries without
charge, access to counsel, or presentment before a judicial officer, all
at the behest of the U.S. government. FBI agents interrogated Meshal
more than thirty times during his detention. Similarly, Naji Hamdan,
a Lebanese-American businessman, sat for interviews with the FBI
several times before moving from Los Angeles to the United Arab Emirates
in 2006. In 2008, he was arrested by U.A.E. security forces and held
incommunicado for nearly three months, beaten, and tortured. At one
point an American participated in his interrogation; Hamdan believed
this person to be an FBI agent based on the interrogator's knowledge of
previous FBI interviews. Another case in 2010, involving an American teenager jailed in Kuwait, may indicate this activity has continued into the Obama administration.***
10. Use of No Fly List to Pressure Americans Abroad to Become Informants
The number of U.S. persons on the No Fly List has more than doubled
since 2009, and people mistakenly on the list are denied their due
process rights to meaningfully challenge their inclusion. In many cases
Americans only find out they are on the list while they are traveling
abroad, which all but forces them to interact with the U.S. government
from a position of extreme vulnerability, and often without easy access
to counsel. Many of those prevented from flying home have been subjected
to FBI interviews while they sought assistance from U.S. Embassies to
return. In those interviews, FBI agents sometimes offer to take people
off the No Fly List if they agree to become an FBI informant. In 2010
the ACLU and its affiliates filed a lawsuit
on behalf of 10 American citizens and permanent residents, including
several U.S. military veterans, seven of whom were prevented from
returning home until the suit was filed. We argue that barring them from
flying without due process was unconstitutional. There are now 13
plaintiffs; none have been charged with a crime, told why they are
barred from flying, or given an opportunity to challenge their inclusion
on the No Fly List.***
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FBI:s 10-stegsmord på amerikansk frihet och globala mänskliga rättigheter efter 9/11
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