He should be ashamed of himself.
"New rules keep powers of FBI agents; Proposal curbs other agencies’ use of profiling" by Matt Apuzzo | New York Times April 10, 2014
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s long-awaited revisions to the Justice Department’s racial profiling rules would allow the FBI to continue many, if not all, of the tactics opposed by civil rights groups, such as mapping ethnic communities and using that data to recruit informants and open investigations.
The new rules, which are in draft form, expand the definition of prohibited profiling to include not just race but religion, national origin, gender, and sexual orientation. And they increase the standards that agents must meet before considering those factors. But they do not change the way the FBI uses nationality to map neighborhoods, recruit informants, or look for foreign spies, according to several current and former US officials either involved in the policy revisions or briefed on them.
While the draft rules allow FBI mapping to continue, they would eliminate the broad national security exemption that former Attorney General John Ashcroft put in place. For Holder, who has made civil rights a central issue of his five years in office, the draft rules represent a compromise between his desire to protect the rights of minorities and the concern of national security officials that they would be hindered in their efforts to combat terrorism.
The Justice Department has been reworking the policy for nearly five years, and civil rights groups hope it will curtail some of the authority granted to the FBI after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Muslims, in particular, say federal agents have unfairly singled them out for investigation.
Holder, who officials say has been the driving force behind the rule change, gave a personal account of his experience with racial profiling Wednesday before the National Action Network, the civil rights group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
See: LBJ Overshadows MLK
Kind of overshadows all of this shit, doesn't it?
“Decades ago, the reality of racial profiling drove my father to sit down and talk with me about how, as a young black man, I should interact with the police if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way I felt was unwarranted,” he said.
Throughout the review process, however, the attorney general and the Justice Department’s civil rights lawyers ran up against a reality: Making the FBI entirely blind to nationality would fundamentally change the government’s approach to national security.
The Bush administration banned racial profiling in 2003, but that did not apply to national security investigations. Since then, the FBI adopted internal rules that prohibit agents from making race or religion and nationality the sole factor for its investigative decisions.
Civil rights groups see that as a loophole that allows the government to collect information about Muslims without evidence of wrongdoing.
Intelligence officials see it as an essential tool. They say, for example, that an FBI agent investigating Al Shabab, a Somali militant group, must be able to find out whether a state has a large Somali population and, if so, where it is.
As written, the new rules are unlikely to satisfy civil rights groups and some of the administration’s liberal allies in Congress. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has said the existing rules “are a license to profile.”
The Justice Department rules would also apply to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, but it is the FBI that has the lead on most national security investigations.
Before agents could consider religion or other factors in their investigations under the new rules, they would need to justify it based on the urgency and totality of the threat and “the nature of the harm to be averted,” according to an official.
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When is he leaving, anyway?
