The Justice Department has a new role planned for the men and women of American law enforcement. Under proposed changes to the very fabric of American life from the U.S. Department of Justice, “police officers” and “secret police,” will become synonymous.  Making local police officers into spies is a remarkable suggestion. But even more incredible is the fact that the proposal has drawn so little attention.

According to the officials at Justice, law enforcement agencies, including local and state units watching for signs of terrorist activity could target groups as well as individuals, and begin criminal intelligence investigations "based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists."

Based on the performance of the TSA, DHS, the FBI and a litany of other agencies and officials in the so-called war on terror, it’s easy to understand why federal officials would want to tap into local law enforcement’s talent pool.

Local cops in the performance of the most routine law enforcement duties have nabbed Tim McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and lots of other evil doers.
But the changes advocated by the Justice Department, an agency itself much in the news recently are not about routine police work.
Instead the proposal is yet another indication of the trend towards deploying local cops as intelligence agents- to infiltrate and inform on suspected terrorists, people who may or may not be involved in some kind of fund-raising that might a terrorism connection, or- as we’ve just seen recently, people that may belong to groups that are anti-death penalty or critical of the military industrial complex.
Basically the changes would move local police forces into the realm of intelligence-gathering that had been the work of the FBI and other federal agencies.

The proposed shift was noticed by the Washington Post, which reported that the Justice Department's proposal "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."
In a shocking case of bad timing, The Post noted that the administration was in the process of revising domestic intelligence gathering in its last months in office, and would lock in policies for President Bush's successor, completing the greatest expansion of executive branch authority since the Watergate era.

Jim McMahon, deputy executive director of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, was quoted by the Post as saying the changes would "catch up with reality," updating rules from the early 1990s to the post-9/11 world.
He said police agencies would still have to demonstrate a "reasonable suspicion" that a target was involved in a crime before collecting intelligence, the Post reported.

But in this “post 9/11 world,” authorities can’t always wait for warrants or new directives from the Justice Dept. That was the case in Maryland recently when the state police infiltrated and surveilled members of local organizations that oppose the death penalty of the occupation of Iraq. In that investigation, undercover police determined that there was no terrorism connection, but entered the names of suspects into terrorism and narcotic databases anyway. Stay tuned for congressional hearings into that debacle.

Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a 16-year veteran of the FBI, said police agencies could misunderstand it as allowing them to collect intelligence "even when no underlying crime is suspected."