I don’t pay any attention to the NYT, and heard about this on Rachel’s radio show.
Eric Lichtblau, NYT (via ICH):
A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday…
Mr. Mukasey emphasized that the F.B.I. would still need a “valid purpose” for an investigation, and that it could not be “simply based on somebody’s race, religion, or exercise of First Amendment rights.”…
The Democratic senators [Feingold, Durbin, Kennedy, Whitehouse] said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.
Michael German, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a former F.B.I. agent, said the plan appeared to open the door still further to the use of data-mining profiles in tracking terrorism.
As Rachel said, this is how the Stasi operated.
It seems the PATRIOT Act made this all “legal.”
And there are no Democrats in Washington holding hunger strikes, no one willing to chain themselves to the podium to protest.
Nothing at all. Not even a whimper.