F.B.I. Struggling to Reinvent Itself to Fight Terror

[cal04]

Last February, top F.B.I. officers from across the nation gathered in a high-security auditorium for the latest plan to reinvent the crime-fighting agency to take on terrorism.

Philip Mudd, who had just joined the bureau from the rival Central Intelligence Agency, was pitching a program called Domain Management, designed to get agents to move beyond chasing criminal cases and start gathering intelligence.

Drawing on things like commercial marketing software and the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without warrants, the program is supposed to identify threats. Mr. Mudd displayed a map of the San Francisco area, pocked with data showing where Iranian immigrants were clustered — and where, he said, an F.B.I. squad was “hunting.”

Some F.B.I. officials found Mr. Mudd’s concept vague and the implied ethnic targeting troubling. How were they supposed to go “hunting” without colliding with the Constitution? Would the C.I.A. man, whom some mocked privately as Rasputin, take the bureau back to the domestic spying scandals of the 1960’s? And why neglect promising cases to, in Mr. Mudd’s words, “search for the unknown”?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/us/10fbi.html?hp&ex=1160452800&en=2c9f7a605c4d631f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. "Comercial Marketing Software"

AKA: Groupware. Perhaps they need to look at open source solutions? ;-)

[0007]

2. Reinventing itself to the non-bias truth would be a start toward

trust with the average American citizen.

[Rex]

3. Yes, reinvent the 'war on something' cause!

:eyes: