Top Democrat sounds alarm over shady FBI program

With the stated purpose of ferreting out extremists living in the United States, the FBI has set up secretive Shared Responsibility Committees (SRC) to collaborate with law enforcement and community leaders throughout the nation. But little is known about how the committees operate or whether they serve a broader, more nefarious purpose.

That’s why Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson is asking the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to investigate whether the FBI initiatives are operating outside the law at the expense of citizen civil liberties.

Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, contends that one of the major reasons the committees are ripe for abuse is that the FBI doesn’t have to suspect an individual of a crime to begin gathering information about him. In fact, when the FBI asks local law enforcement, mental health professionals, religious leaders and other community officials to volunteer information, the agency says it is only hoping to identify people at risk of radicalization so that they can be helped.

Of course, the FBI can still try to find evidence of criminal activity any time a new subject hits its radar thanks to the SRC programs. And the community officials who sign on to help the agency are forced to sign confidentiality agreements.

“Referrals to the committee do not end or preclude FBI from conducting concurrent criminal investigations,” Thompson said. “Moreover, intervention leaders are not protected from becoming a part of ongoing investigations and future criminal and judicial proceedings.”

Basically, this means SRCs are little more than a way for the FBI to vastly expand its national network of informants to include church leaders, mental health professionals and other trusted community members.

For now, the FBI’s efforts appear primarily focused on extremism in the Muslim community.

In an interview with the Intercept, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Abed Ayoub said that the agency should do its own job rather than relying on untrained community members.

“There are many reasons why we feel the SRC program is problematic, but the main reason is that the FBI seems to be outsourcing its intelligence gathering and surveillance to the community,” he said. “There are issues with liability and information sharing, particularly with foreign governments. But it is also troubling that the people on these committees would be ordinary civilians with little training, who may well have their own personal biases.”

It’s also troubling that there is no way to tell how much the FBI might expand its SRC efforts, making it entirely possible that the program could be used to target people for political reasons or anti-government activism.

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