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The new rules were presented as dramatic reforms to protect us, and yet for many people the truly shocking discovery was that the FBI had not been doing these things all along: surfing the Web, sifting through commercial databases, lurking in chat rooms, monitoring public activities. Under the old rules, Ashcroft said, FBI agents were proscribed from doing what any local cop or reporter or concerned citizen would do. An Ashcroft staff member recalls the tortured investigation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik convicted after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. "Here was a guy you knew had ties to a terrorist organization," he says. "You knew he was meeting with his followers in the mosque. The agents couldn't go in. They had to stop at the door because no crime had been committed yet. You look at that and say, 'You've gotta be kidding me.'"
The old guidelines were designed in response to the ugly days when dossiers were built, surveillance kept and blackmail threats held over the heads of people whose only crime was to criticize the U.S. government. But over the years of scandals and lawsuits and congressional inquiries, the rules became as encrusted with legal debris as the tax code. The FBI tried to amend them from time to time, including after the Oklahoma City bombing. But the Clinton Justice Department fought back with hand-to-hand combat and eventually convinced Director Louis Freeh that he had more than enough authority to do what he needed. Said a Republican official familiar with the fight: "The great irony is that most of these limits have been self-imposed. While everyone worries that our civil liberties are being trampled by the CIA and FBI, they've been hamstringing themselves."
Ashcroft and Mueller hope the new guidelines will change all that. Agents can now watch websites where bad guys trade explosives recipes and stolen credit-card numbers. Field agents will have the power to launch preliminary "terrorism enterprise investigations" without prior approval from headquarters, and they can last as long as a year instead of the previous 90 days. Memos like the one released last week, in which an Oklahoma City agent warned back in 1998 of "large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months," will in theory no longer get buried on supervisors' desks.
Taken together, the exposure of the Phoenix, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City memos forced Mueller to back down from the position he had publicly taken in September, when he declared that there had been "no warning signs" that an attack might be in the works. Last week he came closer than anyone else has yet to accepting responsibility for what happened--despite the fact that he took office the week before the Sept. 11 attacks. "I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers," he said.