The irony is that Ashcroft and many members of Congress are now asking the FBI to do exactly what Congress reprimanded the bureau for doing in the 1960s: conduct domestic surveillance and espionage. Ashcroft's announcement, coupled with previous changes passed as part of the USA PATRIOT act, amount to a dramatic spike in the FBI's authority as it makes the transition into a domestic espionage agency.

Danny Coulson, a former FBI commander who founded the bureau's counter-terrorism squad, says that while there may still be some nervousness about domestic spying, the changes are long overdue. "The [old] domestic guidelines -- to look at domestic groups like neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan -- are very restrictive," Coulson says. Coulson's selection of domestic groups would seem to reinforce the assertion made by Dempsey that these new rules are geared primarily toward domestic terrorist groups. "You basically have to have information that a crime is about to be committed before you can investigate a group."

But the linchpin in the new FBI mandate is public trust. Mueller and Ashcroft have essentially asked the American people to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt, and to trust the agency with increased surveillance powers, even though history provides plenty of reasons not to.

Coulson says some of the problems were created by well-intentioned members of Congress trying to clean up the messes of the FBI and CIA in the 1970s. In the mid-1970s, the CIA and FBI came under fire for illegally spying on American citizens. Three investigations (congressional inquiries led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, and by Rep. Otis Pike, D-N.Y., and the Rockefeller Commission led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) led to a series of reforms, including the creation of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to oversee the actions of American intelligence agencies.

"We did some things that were absolutely ridiculous, and because of that a tremendous cloud of suspicion grew over the FBI," says Coulson. "Even now, I think that's part of the problem. People are concerned with how much authority you should give to the bureau."

In a series of upcoming congressional hearings looking into intelligence failures pre-Sept. 11, Ashcroft and Mueller will likely face off with true critics of the new guidelines. Last year, though, Ashcroft seemed to effectively muzzle would-be critics through an implicit threat. When called to testify before the Judiciary Committee last December, Ashcroft demanded passage of the new anti-terrorism bill, saying, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists -- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."

Others, like Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., have argued that the new surveillance powers pose a direct threat to the American way of life. "Preserving our freedom is one of the main reasons that we are now engaged in this new war on terrorism," Feingold said when he cast the lone congressional vote against the USA PATRIOT Act. "We will lose that war without firing a shot if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people. That is why I found the anti-terrorism bill originally proposed by Attorney General Ashcroft and President Bush to be troubling."

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