Just what we needed:
The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.
Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.
Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.
Hmm. Where have I seen this dynamic before?
A spying technique that's currently illegal or otherwise prohibited, but which we're actually engaged in anyway, which the "administration" now proposes we legalize before somebody who takes the rule of law seriously gets elected to the White House.
But don't worry! The FOX Nutwork will have no problem finding Democrats to go on the air and endorse the plan, along with the usual useless caveats:
Former Justice Department official Jamie S. Gorelick said the new FBI guidelines on their own do not raise alarms. But she cited the recent disclosure that undercover Maryland State Police agents spied on death penalty opponents and antiwar groups in 2005 and 2006 to emphasize that the policies would require close oversight.
Oh, OK. All we need is some close oversight. Gotcha. No prob.
Seriously, is now any time to really be so glib about needing close oversight of, well, anything? Saying something requires close oversight to be done right is, these days, tantamount to saying it can't be done.
To borrow a phrase often heard in these parts not so long ago, "Shut up about FISA warrantless surveillance domestic spying already! It's over!"
What do you know? There might have been something fundamentally wrong there, after all.
No one could have foreseen...