Prometheus 6

It's a pre-election day pattern. You throw your most absurd, knee-jerk partisan thoughts into the agora. You expect an hysterical explosion from your opponents. This cheers up your base, upsets your opponents and if they ignore it you might actually make it law.

U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules
More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned
By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 16, 2008; A01

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that 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.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.