I don’t know much about McCarthyism, but just from listening to a short NPR blurb about the FBI’s proposed guidelines that could target people based on race and ethnicity alone, I’m beginning to think more about what it was.
First, the FBI’s proposal from WIRED:
The Justice Department is considering establishing a new policy that would allow the FBI to target Americans for investigation even in the absence of evidence or other compelling indications that the person was breaking a law, according to the Associated Press.
The policy, being considered as part of the attorney general’s guidelines to the FBI, would allow the agency to conduct racial profiling — potentially singling out Muslim- and Arab-Americans — and to open preliminary terrorism investigations against targets simply on the basis of patterns established through data mining public records and other information.
The agency would be allowed to profile targets based on their race and activities, such as travel to the Middle East or any other part of the world associated with terrorism. But race would be only one factor in the decision to open an investigation.
How about leaving dissenting opinionated comments on a conservative blog run by someone like, oh, say, Rush Limbaugh?
When would they take effect:
The new guidelines would be put in place before the presidential administration changes next January.
How convenient.
The DOJ claims that nothing new would really be going on:
Targeting a person based on race, of course, would seem to be a clear violation of civil rights. A DoJ official told the AP that the guidelines wouldn’t really give the FBI any more authority than it already has to create “threat assessments” of individuals. A DoJ spokesman added that the guidelines cannot authorize any activity that is unconstitutional or prohibited by statute.
USAToday has a thorough piece here:
Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI will be allowed to begin investigations simply “by assuming that everyone’s a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent,” said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
…
The changes would allow FBI agents to ask open-ended questions about activities of Muslim- or Arab-Americans, or investigate them if their jobs and backgrounds should match trends that analysts deem suspect.
FBI agents would not be allowed to eavesdrop on phone calls or dig deeply into personal data, such as the content of phone or e-mail records or bank statements, until a full investigation had been opened.
The guidelines focus on the FBI’s domestic operations and run about 40 pages long, several officials said. They do not specifically spell out what traits the FBI should use in building profiles.
Perhaps the best re-branding of a concept (think, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”):
Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the guidelines are part of a “harmonizing” process that will not give the FBI more authority than it already has.
Spoken like a true spokesman. Having worked in that OPA, I can just imagine.
What can be and is being done to halt or inhibit the proposed guidelines?
Although the guidelines do not require congressional approval, House members recently sought to limit such profiling by rejecting an $11 million (euro7 million) request for the FBI’s security assessment center. Lawmakers wrote that it was unclear how the FBI could compile suspect profiles “in such a way as to avoid needless intrusions into the privacy of innocent citizens” and without wasting time and money chasing down false leads.
The denial of money could limit the FBI’s use of profiles, or “predictive models and patterns of behavior” as the government prefers to describe the data-mining results, but would not change the guidelines authorizing them. The guidelines would remain in effect until a new attorney general decided to change them.
Courts across the country have overturned criminal convictions when defendants showed they were targeted based on race. Racial profiling generally is considered a civil rights violation, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft condemned it in March 2001 as an “unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution.”
President George W. Bush also has condemned racial profiling as “wrong in America,” and in a December 2001 interview he had harsh words for an airline that refused to let one of his Secret Service agents board a commercial flight. The agent was Arab-American. “If he was treated that way because of his ethnicity, that will make me madder than heck,” Bush said.
Madder than heck, eh? Waterboarding - does that make you madder than heck too?
Ugh.
What’s also amazing to me is that, with all the complaints you hear about from John McCain and others re: we need tort reform to keep down lawsuits and losses to business and to keep down insurance medmal rates and out of control jury awards, can you think of any sector that will do better if such guidelines are approved than the legal profession?
To wit:
Martin Redish, a constitutional and civil rights scholar at Northwestern University School of Law, said courts probably will give the FBI a lot of leeway in deciding how to open national security investigations.
“But it’s a very fine line to be drawn when the basis of the investigation is dominated by the ethnic background of the subject,” Redish said. “And when the investigation results in harassment, you have a serious constitutional concern.”
Think I’ll go read up on McCarthyism.
I found 8 ways that I use social media in my branding and marketing business: 
PodCampOhio — what a massive meet up and sharing of some super information about podcasting, webcasting, and wordpress ideas & how-to’s yesterday in Columbus Ohio at the ITT Technical Institute!
