Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
New FBI Director James Comey may have to make big cuts to the bureau’s budget because of a government shutdown and last year’s sequester.
The ACLU has some ideas about “programs that deserve to get the axe, because they’re ineffective, undermine innocent Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, or simply offend American values.”
The recommendations are: Stop identifying neighborhoods by race in order to investigate them; quit collecting information on innocent Americans a part of “Domain Management;” end intrusive programs called “assessments” that target people or groups without any reason to believe they broke the law; do away with the new database, eGuardian, because it encourages racial discrimination; and end the collection of all U.S. telephone call data.
“Spying on innocent people rarely helps find guilty people,” the ACLU wrote. “We hope that by giving Director Comey a few ideas about FBI programs that can be cut to save expenses, he can turn his attention to other abusive FBI practices documented in the ACLU report. Ending practices that violate civil liberties won’t necessarily put the FBI’s budget back in the black, but it is still the right thing to do.”
