ACLU - Unleashed and Unaccountable: Introduction lyrics

On September 4, 2013,James B. Comey was sworn in as the 7th director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Comey is taking the helm of an agency that has transformed during the 12-year term of Director Robert S. Mueller III into a domestic intelligence and law enforcement agency of unprecedented power and international reach. Today's FBI doesn't just search for evidence to catch criminals, terrorists, and spies. Working with other government agencies and private companies, it helps gather information about millions of law abiding Americans, tracking our communications and a**ociations. It has mapped American communities based on race, ethnicity, religion, and national origin and exploited community outreach programs to monitor the First Amendment activities of religious groups. It has hara**ed non-violent political activists with surveillance, unwarranted investigations, and even aggressive nationwide raids that resulted in no criminal charges. The FBI retains the information it collects through its investigations and intelligence activities in vast databases containing billions of records that agents can mine for myriad purposes, even without opening an official investigation or otherwise documenting their searches. The FBI has exploited secret interpretations of the laws governing domestic surveillance to expand its reach and simply ignored other legal restrictions designed to protect our constitutional rights. It has frustrated congressional, judicial, and public oversight through excessive secrecy, official misrepresentations of its activities, and suppression of government whistleblowers and the press. Even more opaque are the FBI's intelligence and law enforcement exploits abroad. American citizens traveling overseas have been detained by foreign governments at the behest of the U.S. government and interrogated by FBI agents. Other Americans were blocked from flying home because they were placed on the U.S. government's No Fly List and then pressured to become FBI informants when they sought redress at U.S. Emba**ies. Such abuse is the inevitable product of a deliberate effort by Congress, two presidents, and successive attorneys general to vest the FBI with the powers of a secret domestic intelligence agency. The FBI has an extremely dedicated and proficient workforce that is given the crucial and enormously difficult mission of protecting our nation from a diverse array of domestic and international threats. When at its best, the FBI uses its law enforcement authorities in a narrowly tailored and focused way to protect American communities from dangerous criminals and defend the national security from foreign spies and terrorists. When it uses its power in a fair and equal manner, the FBI strengthens and reinforces the rule of law by protecting civil rights and holding corrupt government officials and abusive law enforcement officers to account. The tools and authorities the FBI needs to fulfill these critical responsibilities are far too easily abused, however, particularly because they are often exercised under a shroud of secrecy where legal restraints are too easily treated as unnecessary impediments to mission success. Establishing and maintaining effective checks against error and abuse is necessary for the FBI to remain an effective law enforcement agency and essential to securing liberty and preserving democratic processes. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress and the attorney general loosened many of the legal and policy restraints on the FBI that had been designed to curb abuses of a previous era. Ignoring history's lessons, policy makers urged the FBI to take on a greater domestic intelligence role, and it adopted this mission with an overzealous vigor. The FBI's resulting transformation into a secret domestic intelligence agency is dangerous to a free and democratic society, especially because rapidly developing technologies have made it possible for the FBI to gather, catalog, and an*lyze ma**ive amounts of information about countless Americans suspected of no wrongdoing at all. There is already substantial evidence that the FBI has gravely misused its new authorities and capabilities, as this report will detail. And there is little evidence to suggest that these new powers have made Americans any safer from crime and terrorism. Members of Congress continue to struggle to obtain reliable information demonstrating the effectiveness of the FBI's overbroad surveillance programs, and several deadly attacks by persons who had previously been investigated by the FBI raise serious questions about whether the influx of data is making it harder to detect threats, rather than easier. Congress and the president should take the opportunity presented by this change of leadership at the FBI to conduct a comprehensive examination of the FBI's policies and practices to identify and curtail any activities that are illegal, unconstitutional, discriminatory, ineffective, or easily misused. The purpose of this report is to highlight the changes to FBI authorities that have had the most significant impact on the privacy and civil rights and liberties of Americans; to provide examples of error and abuse over the last 12 years that establish evidence of the need for reform; and to offer an agenda to restore the FBI to its proper role in the American criminal justice landscape as the pre-eminent federal law enforcement agency that serves as a model for all others in its effectiveness and in its respect for individual rights and civil liberties.