[iwar] [fc:How.Far.Do.We.Want.The.FBI.To.Go?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-06-09 21:32:58


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:How.Far.Do.We.Want.The.FBI.To.Go?]
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Sunday, Jun. 02, 2002
How Far Do We Want The FBI To Go?
BY MICHAEL DUFFY AND NANCY GIBBS

<a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,257103,00.html">http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,257103,00.html>

Back in the dark, scary days of autumn, top law-and-order men like John
Ashcroft and Tom Ridge pinned little silver sheriff's stars to every
American chest and told us to be vigilant, form neighborhood watch groups
and report anything suspicious. The 911 lines promptly jammed, local cops
chased flocks of wild geese, and no one felt much safer.

Too much information, it turns out, is sometimes not much better than too
little ‹ especially if the information ends up in the hands of a federal
agency that doesn't know what to do with it, an agency that hates
embarrassment above all things. So it was extraordinary to see last week
what it takes to bring an agency like the FBI to its knees, make it admit
defeat and promise ‹ yet again ‹ to mend its ways. Minneapolis, Minn., agent
Coleen Rowley's blistering 13-page memo, first published by TIME, detailed
some warnings that had been ignored and the opportunities that were missed
even when the FBI agents working on the strange case of suspected terrorist
Zacarias Moussaoui implored headquarters to act before something really bad
happened.

Rowley's memo ripped into FBI chief Robert Mueller just as he was changing
the way the bureau hunts terrorists in the U.S.--nine months after he first
made that very same promise. Mueller announced Wednesday that he was
retargeting more agents at the terrorists, empowering local field agents to
seize the initiative, centralizing information in Washington so that every
agent would know what every other agent was doing and creating a special
branch of analysts to think through every unimaginable possibility. Mueller
cited Rowley's memo and an e-mail written last summer by agent Kenneth
Williams in Phoenix, Ariz., as proof that the bureau was broken and needed
repairs. "We have to develop the capability to anticipate attacks," he said.
"We have to develop the capability of looking around corners."

Nobody was arguing with that, but not everyone was applauding Thursday when
Attorney General Ashcroft announced that he was rewriting the rules that
govern the way FBI agents launch and conduct probes of suspected terrorists
here at home. The new rules, Ashcroft said, would help the feds prevent
terrorist strikes rather than deal with them after they happen. But
lawmakers of both parties complained that Ashcroft had cast off a
26-year-old policy without giving them any notice. Civil libertarians cried
that the FBI was trampling on privacy in the name of security. And even
George W. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, was irked that the White House
had been left out of the loop.

The new rules were presented as dramatic reforms to protect us, and yet for
many people the truly shocking discovery was that the FBI had not been doing
these things all along: surfing the Web, sifting through commercial
databases, lurking in chat rooms, monitoring public activities. Under the
old rules, Ashcroft said, FBI agents were proscribed from doing what any
local cop or reporter or concerned citizen would do. An Ashcroft staff
member recalls the tortured investigation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the
blind sheik convicted after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
"Here was a guy you knew had ties to a terrorist organization," he says.
"You knew he was meeting with his followers in the mosque. The agents
couldn't go in. They had to stop at the door because no crime had been
committed yet. You look at that and say, 'You've gotta be kidding me.'"

The old guidelines were designed in response to the ugly days when dossiers
were built, surveillance kept and blackmail threats held over the heads of
people whose only crime was to criticize the U.S. government. But over the
years of scandals and lawsuits and congressional inquiries, the rules became
as encrusted with legal debris as the tax code. The FBI tried to amend them
from time to time, including after the Oklahoma City bombing. But the
Clinton Justice Department fought back with hand-to-hand combat and
eventually convinced Director Louis Freeh that he had more than enough
authority to do what he needed. Said a Republican official familiar with the
fight: "The great irony is that most of these limits have been self-imposed.
While everyone worries that our civil liberties are being trampled by the
CIA and FBI, they've been hamstringing themselves."

Ashcroft and Mueller hope the new guidelines will change all that. Agents
can now watch websites where bad guys trade explosives recipes and stolen
credit-card numbers. Field agents will have the power to launch preliminary
"terrorism enterprise investigations" without prior approval from
headquarters, and they can last as long as a year instead of the previous 90
days. Memos like the one released last week, in which an Oklahoma City agent
warned back in 1998 of "large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving
flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months," will in theory no
longer get buried on supervisors' desks.

Taken together, the exposure of the Phoenix, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City
memos forced Mueller to back down from the position he had publicly taken in
September, when he declared that there had been "no warning signs" that an
attack might be in the works. Last week he came closer than anyone else has
yet to accepting responsibility for what happened ‹ despite the fact that he
took office the week before the Sept. 11 attacks. "I cannot say for sure
that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that
would have led us to the hijackers," he said.

That was probably further than the White House wanted Mueller to go; such
mea culpas invite talk of a never-ending blue-ribbon commission ‹ something
the Bush team dreads. But there are few signs that the White House is, in
fact, dissatisfied with Mueller. Even before last week, he quietly replaced
more than a third of the FBI's senior executives, hoping to break open the
culture of caution that so stymied agents in the field. Sources tell TIME
that Mueller is actually policing top agents' efficiency by insisting that
each document be marked to indicate how long the author took to prepare it.
And Mueller has discovered that when he can't retrieve a document from the
FBI's impenetrable archives, he can usually call someone at the CIA, where
many of the same papers are more carefully sorted and filed. "The FBI,"
notes an agency official, "is archivally challenged."

But Mueller, like his predecessors, is walking a narrow line. "The reason
the folks at FBI headquarters are paralyzed is they have to undergo a Senate
inquisition every time they act," says a former Clinton Justice Department
official. "If they investigate Wen Ho Lee, it's profiling. If they don't
investigate, they're attacked for letting the China stuff go by. They can't
win. They are paralyzed because the Senators who are jumping up and down
today about the FBI being paralyzed will be jumping up and down tomorrow
when they go too far."

Both Mueller and whistle-blower Rowley will be pressed hard about the FBI's
many problems and the wisdom of the new rules when they testify on Capitol
Hill this week. Bureau veterans are the first to say that little in last
fall's antiterrorism bill or last week's new rules would have helped stop
the hijackers as they went about planning their strike. The problem was not
just that clues pointing to the 19 terrorists weren't discovered; it was
also that wispy evidence and agents' observations about the possibility of
hijackings weren't being analyzed, evaluated and judged for their meaning.
That's one reason insiders say the most important reform may be Mueller's
creation of an Office of Intelligence, staffed with foreign-language
speakers and regional experts who will report to FBI counterterrorism chief
Dale Watson. "For years," says a former Justice official, "the analysts were
not the heroes of this agency. Nobody wanted to be one. Nobody wanted to
listen to them."

So can the FBI turn itself into a domestic CIA? "The question now is, How
quickly can you change a complex political culture?" says Joseph Nye, dean
of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Spy agencies such as the CIA are
all about cracking codes, uncovering secrets. "During the cold war," Nye
says, "they didn't believe it was important unless you had to steal it. But
some of the biggest and hardest questions are mysteries ‹ and most of the
answers to a mystery are available in the public domain and just have to be
assembled." At the FBI, "getting people to sit in the back office and
connect dots has not been their strong suit. Now they know they have to do
it. The question is, Will they?"

Any move to make it easier for federal agents to track what private citizens
do privately, though, makes libertarians on the left and right edgy. On
Friday, House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, a
conservative Republican, said he was "deeply troubled by the Department of
Justice's failure to consult with Congress over changes to investigative
policies that have been in place for more than 20 years." Civil libertarians
warned that however sensible the reforms sounded, the potential for abuse by
"cowboy" agents was great and that the letter and spirit of the Constitution
do not endorse the sacrifice of privacy for security. "You could make the
country safer from terror by attending every meeting at every mosque, but do
you want to do that?" asks Robert Litt, a top Justice official under Janet
Reno. "The question will be, What do they do and where do they go with this
new power?" Polls have consistently shown a public willingness to trade some
privacy for security. The harder questions are, Whose privacy, and how much,
and will it actually do any good?

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