Nat Hentoff writes:
Many Americans may not remember, if they ever knew, that toward the end of the Bush administration, FBI Director Robert Mueller and then Attorney General Michael Mukasey so greatly expanded the “Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations” that now, in Barack Obama’s presidency, we have essentially returned to the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, who was convinced that a citizen’s right to a private life and to his or her own thoughts could be ignored for national security.
The FBI, with no objection from Obama, can conduct a “threat assessment” — an investigation — on any of us without a judicial warrant or any articulable suspicion of criminal activity. During J. Edgar Hoover’s time, there was much public protest and reporting on his erasing of our Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure … against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Read more in the Billings Gazette.