U.S. may ease police spy rules

U.S. may ease police spy rules

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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.

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I'll be the first to admit that I didn't expect this when the news about Bush overhauling federal spying procedures was reported on a few weeks ago. This one I don't like. I actually can see some benefit to the feds having a little more wiggle room on domestic spying, but when that wiggle room gets expanded to state & local law enforcement, a force which has proven itself to have more than a few bad apples in recent years, then I call foul. Of course as nobody from either party really seems to be saying anything about these new rules, I don't see them reverting back to the previous, stricter rules, regardless of who's in power... so maybe even posting about them is pointless.

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(visit the link for the full news article)