FBI Made Up 'Threats' At Peace Rally, Lied To Congress, To Justify Spying Activity

from the feeling-safer? dept
by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Sep. 22, 2010

Thought the days of the FBI considering any group with an agenda that disagreed with the federal government a threat to be "infiltrated" were over? Apparently not. It's been well-established that the FBI used a ridiculously broad net in figuring out who to investigate after September 11th, targeting all sorts of groups that were clearly not terrorist fronts, including a peace rally in Pittsburgh. When the news of that came out a few years back, it got a lot of attention. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act to find out the details of what the FBI was doing at such rallies, and apparently a new report by the Inspector General suggests the FBI put a lot more effort into the coverup than it did in figuring out who they should actually be watching (found via Todd McDermid):

As the inspector general put it, the FBI's elaborate, "after-the-fact reconstruction" of the Pittsburgh events, designed to fabricate a counter-terrorism rationale for the rookie's surveillance mission, "was not corroborated by any witnesses or contemporaneous documents."

Basically, the FBI put a lot of effort into faking a terrorist threat at this event that would require having an FBI agent sent there. They even created a fake paper trail, and all this resulted in FBI director Robert Mueller giving "inaccurate and misleading" testimony to Congress. Of course, this isn't new. We seem to see this all the time from the Justice Department. So why is it that we keep allowing less and less oversight over the Justice Department, when they seem to just abuse their position more and more?