FBI to Expand Domestic Surveillance Powers as Details Emerge
of Its Spy Campaign Targeting Activists

Democracy Now!

June 14, 2011

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/14/fbi_to_expand_domestic_surveillance_powers

Civil liberties advocates are raising alarm over news the
FBI is giving agents more leeway to conduct domestic
surveillance. According to the New York Times, new
guidelines will allow FBI agents to investigate people and
organizations "proactively" without firm evidence for
suspecting criminal activity. We speak to former FBI agent
Mike German, who now works at the American Civil Liberties
Union, and Texas activist Scott Crow, who has been the focus
of intense FBI surveillance from 2001 until at least 2008.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, Crow received 440
pages of heavily redacted documents revealing the FBI had
set up a video camera outside his house, traced the license
plates of cars parked in front of his home, recorded the
arrival and departure of his guests, and observed gatherings
that Crow attended at bookstores and cafes. The agency also
tracked Crow's emails and phone conversations and picked
through his trash to identify his bank and mortgage
companies. "It's been definitely traumatizing at different
points," says Crow. "But if we don't come out and be open
about this, then they've already won, and the surveillance
and the `war on terror' wins against us."

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AMY GOODMAN: Civil liberties advocates are raising alarm
over news that the FBI is giving agents more leeway to
conduct domestic surveillance. According to the New York
Times, new guidelines will allow FBI agents to investigate
people and organizations "proactively" without firm evidence
for suspecting criminal activity. The new rules will free up
agents to infiltrate organizations, search household trash,
use surveillance teams, search databases, conduct lie
detector tests, even without suspicion of any wrongdoing.

The revised guidelines come as the FBI's existing practices
have already come under wide scrutiny. Last month, the New
York Times revealed a number of new revelations against
activists targeted by domestic spying. One of those
activists is 44-year-old Scott Crow, an Austin, Texas
resident, self-proclaimed anarchist. He has just learned he
was targeted by the FBI from 2001 until at least 2008. Using
the Freedom of Information Act, Scott received 440 pages of
heavily redacted documents revealing the FBI had traced the
license plates of cars parked in front of his home, recorded
the arrival and departure of his guests, observed gatherings
that he attended at bookstores and cafes. The agency also
tracked his emails and phone conversations, picked through
his trash to identify his bank and mortgage companies,
visited a gun store where he had sought to purchase a rifle
for self-defense. Agents monitored - also asked the Internal
Revenue Service to examine his tax returns, and even
infiltrated activist groups he associated with. While Crow
has been arrested a dozen times in his years of activism, he
has never faced a charge more serious than trespassing. He
is among a growing number of people and groups finding
themselves on the receiving end of government spying.

Well, Scott Crow joins us now from Austin, Texas, to tell
his story. And we're also joined from Washington, D.C., by
Mike German, national security policy counsel for the
American Civil Liberties Union. He previously served as an
FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism from
1988 to 2004.

Mike German, we want to start with you on the most recent
news of the new leeway granted to FBI agents, of which you
were one years ago, to monitor people, not under any
criminal charges or even suspicion. Explain what you
understand is happening right now.

MIKE GERMAN: Right. You might remember that in 2008 Attorney
General Michael Mukasey altered the attorney general
guidelines that govern the FBI's investigative authorities,
and he created a new category of investigations called
"assessments." And these required no factual predicate - in
other words, no evidence that anybody had done anything
wrong, much less the person who is under investigation. And
there are a number of intrusive investigative techniques
that were allowed to be used, including physical
surveillance, including recruiting and tasking informants,
including FBI agents acting in ruse trying to gather
information from the subjects of the investigation,
conducting interviews, even using grand jury subpoenas to
get telephone records.

What the new changes to the FBI's internal policy is, to
allow FBI agents, even without an assessment being open, to
search commercial databases - these are subscription
services of data aggregators that collect, you know, a broad
swath of information and really have a lot of detailed
private information about people - and also state and local
law enforcement databases. Again, this is without any
suspicion of wrongdoing. Without even opening an
investigation, agents can start searching for all this
private information.

Another increase in their authority is with assessments that
they use to determine whether an informant is - whether they
can recruit an informant. And one of the things they're
allowed to do is they're adding trash haul, which means that
when you put your garbage out for the garbageman to pick up,
it's an FBI agent picking it up instead, and they go through
all this material. And when I asked why they would want to
give agents that authority - again, before you have any
evidence of wrongdoing - and they said, "Well, it's often
helpful to find something derogatory that could be used to
pressure the person into becoming an informant." So, you
know, this is a technique being used specifically to coerce
somebody to cooperate against their neighbors or co-workers.

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI declined our interview request today
but did send us a statement about the new guidelines.
Quoting FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni, saying, quote:
"Each proposed change has been carefully looked at and
considered against the backdrop of the tools our employees
need to accomplish their mission, the possible risks
associated with use of those tools, and the controls that
are in place. Overall, this is fine tuning, not any major
change. The FBI's authority to use specific investigative
tools is determined through the U.S. Constitution, U.S.
statutes, executive orders and the Attorney General's
Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. The Domestic
Investigations Operations Guide cannot and does not confer
additional powers to agents beyond that provided by those
controlling authorities." Your thoughts on that, Mike
German?

MIKE GERMAN: Well, again, the 2008 attorney general
guidelines so loosened the standards for FBI investigations
that they're basically nonexistent. No factual predicate is
required. So the idea that agents would be able to start
those investigations without even going through an
administrative hurdle of opening an assessment, I think, is
an expansion of power that is completely unaccountable.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Scott Crow to hear a real-life
story. Scott, talk about when you first applied under the
Freedom of Information Act to get information about whether
the FBI was monitoring you.

SCOTT CROW: Well, there's a local organization called the
Austin People's Legal Collective. It all came out after
Brandon Darby came out as an informant in 2008. Austin
People's Legal Collective decided to put together a FOIA
request for about 30 activists, about 40 organizations and
about 10 events going back to the year 2000 in Austin. We
sent it to multiple field offices around the country and
then - to see what we'd get back, to try to build a picture
of what kind of surveillance had been going on, if there's
other infiltration. And in that, most - about 50 percent of
the documents that came back came back with nothing. About
30 percent came back - people came back with a mention, or a
group came back with a mention. And then there was two
cases, a case with the woman who organized the Showdown in
Texas, which was an event in 2003 - there was about 400
pages of documents - and then mine was a case where they had
years of extensive documentation going on. And that was kind
of the impetus of it all. And through that, I was able to
find out that, you know, that I had - there had been five
informants in my life. Brandon Darby was just the last one,
who had run through our communities. But when we did this,
we did it across nine states. And I found out I was
investigated in nine states for arsons and other criminal
acts that I was never charged with.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Brandon Darby, for those who aren't
familiar, who has become a very familiar name in progressive
circles, explain your relationship with him and who he is.

SCOTT CROW: Brandon Darby was a person who had been a friend
of mine and been on the edge of the activist community
within Austin for a number of years. He and I had gone to
New Orleans together, and then I ended up co-founding an
organization called Common Ground Relief out of that, out of
those actions. And he worked at Common Ground for a couple
of years and left, and then he ended up setting up -
participating in this case with two men at the Republican
National Convention, where he possibly entrapped them, but
definitely provoked them into doing actions that they would
not normally have done, which they ended up going to prison
for. And then he came out as an informant, and it turned out
he had been investigating a number of us for a number of
years.

AMY GOODMAN: So, when exactly did you get the documents from
the FBI? And talk about the extent that they showed of their
surveillance of you.

SCOTT CROW: Well, let me - let me backtrack for a second. I
first found out that I was listed as a domestic terrorist in
2006. The FBI, in the way that they ended up dealing with a
lot of law enforcement around the country is they let the
local DAs and the local law enforcement officers know in
different cities. So in 2006, they let the DA in Baton Rouge
know, and he let the lawyers for the Angola 3 know, and the
Angola 3 lawyer told me. And that was the first time I ever
heard about it, that I was listed as a domestic terrorist
and an animal rights extremist.

And what it did was it opened up this world of possibilities
in this kafkaesque world, where I'm not being formally
charged with anything, but all of these things are
happening. I mean, I could see people sitting out in front
of my house for years - I mean, all different kinds of cars.
And I'm not a paranoid person. I live a very transparent,
open glass house. But I could see all these things
happening.

There was a BOLO that was issued, a "be on the lookout"
report that was issued in 2008, in the Austin Police
Department that said I might injure police officers, burn
down police cars, or incite riots. And the way I knew about
it is because people from the city that I had worked with
told me that they saw this poster with my picture on it.
Now, again, I couldn't do anything about this. Well,
finally, in 2010, I get these documents that list me as a
domestic terrorist since 2001, and it starts - the picture
starts to become clearer on all of the things that the FBI
has been doing across states, across multiple states, to
investigate me and to sow dissent, basically, amongst local
and regional law enforcement.

AMY GOODMAN: Some of the redacted FBI documents that show
the surveillance of you, Scott, have been posted on the New
York Times website. One FBI report describes the meeting of
an activist group that you were a part of, saying, quote,
"Most attendees dressed like hippies, had [dreadlocks] (both
men and women), and smelled of bad odor." Another report has
the extensive details on the contents of your trash.

SCOTT CROW: I mean, those two incidences just scratch the
surface. The infiltration happened over and over again in
different groups, in different events. There would be law
enforcement and informants and people gathering information
at all different levels - city, county, state and federal
authorities - and private security, too. It's a revolving
door between that sharing information and all of these
things. Going through the trash was part of it.

But really, what was - to me, what I think we should talk
about is that - how much money they spent investigating me,
and not charging me with anything. You know, like, if I'm
the tip of the iceberg and there's other people in other
communities that they're doing this with, how much is the
government spending to do something like this? And what kind
of chilling effect does it have on activist communities and
on us as citizens in this country?

AMY GOODMAN: How extensive, in terms of throughout the
United States, was the monitoring of you, Scott? What have
you figured out at this point?

SCOTT CROW: Well, they investigated me in nine states, like
I said, in 12 field offices. There was five informants.
There was one in Austin, two in Houston, one in Dallas and
one in Detroit. I could only identify three of those people.
The other ones I can't even identify who they are, people I
might have come in contact with over and over again. But
they're targeting - but what we found out through these
FOIAs -

AMY GOODMAN: They went to - they went out -

SCOTT CROW: - and through other FOIAs that -

AMY GOODMAN: They went out to the IRS to investigate you, as
well?

SCOTT CROW: Absolutely. They sent a letter to the IRS to see
if they could get me for tax evasion. And luckily, my
partner Ann and I had always had our taxes done, because we
had owned our own businesses for the longest time, and they
found - the IRS came back and said they couldn't - there was
nothing they could do about it. And there seemed to be a
consternation at the FBI about that.

They also used closed-circuit television on a house in
Dallas that I lived in, and then in Austin, where they put
cameras across - on poles across the streets from my house.
The levels that they went to, I think, are unimaginable to
most people, because it's what you hear about in movies or
what people fear the most about it. But pretty much anything
that you can think of that they did, except for kicking my
door in, happened to me. I was threatened with grand juries,
the trash digging, which they did on two occasions on the
trash digging, being visited at my work and visited at my
home. You know, Mike German spoke to, earlier, how they try
to put pressure on people to give information. I was first
visited by the FBI in 1999. That was the first time I ever
heard the words "domestic terrorism" and "animal rights"
used together. And also, not only did they try to implicate
me in some crimes in Dallas or say that I had - or suggest
that I had some responsibility for those crimes, then they
tried to use that pressure to get me to give information on
other people.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you were -

SCOTT CROW: And so, how many people is that happening to
across the country?

AMY GOODMAN: That is a very important question. Mike German,
you're with the ACLU. There have been a number of raids.
These are the obvious - you know, more obvious
manifestations of this, raids in Chicago and Minneapolis of
activists' homes. Can you talk about how wide this
surveillance is and what you understand is happening in
other parts of the country?

MIKE GERMAN: Sure. I think, like Scott said, we only see the
tip of the iceberg. But in 2004, 2005 and 2006, the ACLU
issued a number of Freedom of Information Act requests for
Joint Terrorism Task Force investigations against a number
of political - politically active groups who suspected that
they were spied on, the same way Scott did. And we uncovered
widespread surveillance of different, you know, peace and
justice groups, environmental groups, all kinds of different
groups. And that, in turn, started an inspector general
investigation that was just released in September of 2010
that showed that the FBI was opening these investigations
with what they called factually weak predicates, sometimes
even speculative predicates. So it wasn't that they thought
that the groups were involved in any criminal activity now,
but just that it was a possibility in the future they might
be. Well, of course, that's true for all of us. We all might
be future criminals. And that was the sole criteria that the
FBI was using to open preliminary inquiries.

Now, these are supposed to be predicated investigations
where there is some factual basis. And these investigations,
unfortunately, the IG only looked at the cases that the ACLU
had already uncovered. He didn't look beyond those. But what
he found was those investigations remained open for years,
with no evidence of wrongdoing, that the victims of these
investigations would be put on terrorist watch lists. And,
you know, you can imagine, for a political activist, you
know, kind of like Scott recounted, when the FBI is going
around telling local officials that this political activist
is a terrorist, that cripples their ability to be effective
in their advocacy. And it creates a huge chilling effect
that affects not just the people under investigation, but
others active on those political issues, and even further,
people who want to be active but feel it's not worth it to
come under that kind of surveillance. So it has a real
serious effect on our democracy. And that's really, you
know, one of the most dangerous parts about this.

AMY GOODMAN: How has the FBI changed from Bush to Obama? I
mean, Robert Mueller has now been head of the FBI for almost
10 years under Bush and Obama.

MIKE GERMAN: You know, this meeting that we were brought to
about the expansion of the FBI's authority last month was
really the first opportunity. We were hoping, because we
criticized the 2008 guidelines that were put in place in
December of 2008 - so, literally just a month before the
Obama administration took over - we had criticized those
heavily, so we were hoping that what we were going to hear
was that our criticism had been heard and that they were
going to scale back some of the things they were doing. One
of the things that we're still working on is an authority
the FBI has given itself in their internal guidelines that
allows them to collect racial and ethnic demographic data
and to map racial and ethnic communities and collect racial
and ethnic behavioral information, whatever that is. And
we're trying to use Freedom of Information Act to get at
that information, but it's difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Crow, what are your plans right now? And
I want to ask Mike German also, what kind of recourse does
someone like Scott have, now that you've learned the extent
of the surveillance? Do you even know, Scott, right now if
you're be monitored?

SCOTT CROW: I assume that I am, because my documents ended
in 2008. They said that was all that there was. And just to
clarify, they gave me 500 pages of 1,200 pages. So there's
still 700 pages more to get. We're going to sue to try to
get the rest of them and try to get the redactions taken
away, so we can see what was going on. But my biggest thing
is not to - to tell people not to be afraid, because
everything that people fear I've had happen to me, and I'm
still OK. And I don't mean that in a cavalier way, because
it's been definitely traumatizing at different points, but
if we don't come out and be open about this, then they've
already won, and the surveillance and the "war on terror"
wins against us.

AMY GOODMAN: And Mike German, the kind of recourse people
have? How do they even find out if they are the subject of
surveillance?

MIKE GERMAN: It's very difficult. I mean, one of the things
that we're just finding out in a California case is that the
FBI and the Department of Justice have been interpreting a
portion of the Freedom of Information Act to allow them to
falsely say they do not have responsive documents when they
do. So it makes unclear whether the government is even being
upfront about whether they have documents that they're not
giving you. So it's very difficult, but we're working with
the Freedom of Information Act the best we can. We're
working through the courts, and we're working on Capitol
Hill, trying to get our elected representatives to realize
how important this is to the American public and to our
democracy. If people are afraid to engage in political
activism, that's ultimately going to hurt us more than, you
know, the waste of resources and other aspects of this that
are also untenable.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both very much for
being with us, Mike German, national security policy counsel
for the American Civil Liberties Union, formerly an FBI
agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism, and thank
you to Scott Crow, Austin-based activist targeted by FBI
surveillance. His book Black Flags and Windmills is set to
be published in August.

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