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This article contains an oft-repeated but demonstrably false statement that w/o a broad DT law "...authorities can do little to intervene pre-emptively without evidence of a planned violent act or other crime."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/capitol-riot-warnings-werent-acted-on-as-system-failed-11612787596?reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter via @WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/articles/capitol-riot-warnings-werent-acted-on-as-system-failed-11612787596?reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter via @WSJ
The Attorney General's Guideline for Domestic FBI Investigations are public. You can read them, and the line above is not what they say. Assessments can be open with "authorized purpose but not any particular factual predicate." https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/docs/guidelines.pdf
Preliminary Investigations require only "information or an allegation," and a 2010 Inspector General report on FBI investigations of peace activists and environmentalists said FBI agents can and do make the allegations themselves: https://oig.justice.gov/reports/review-fbis-investigations-certain-domestic-advocacy-groups-redacted-version
Plenty has been written about how easily the FBI abused these new powers, such as this while I was at the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-unchecked-abuse-authority
The Brennan Center's Emily Berman explained the broad scope of the FBI's powers here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2112175
But the WSJ article acknowledges there was publicly available information that far-right militant were planning to attack the U.S. Capitol, so they didn't lack predicating evidence anyway. Far-right militants attacked Oregon State House 2 wks earlier: https://news.yahoo.com/heavily-armed-far-mob-descends-172323901.html
And had rampaged through DC in the previous months, so it is hard to suggest there was insufficient criminal predicate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/trump-rally-violence-proud-boys/2020/12/14/bf2f5826-3e26-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html
AG Barr even set up a task force to investigate protest violence, but it has been reported that these efforts were overwhelmed trying to make cases against Trump's imaginary "antifa" threat: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/us/politics/trump-right-wing-domestic-terrorism.html
It's hard to imagine how the FBI's authorities could be any broader, but it isn't hard to imagine how it would use them: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/29/fbi-surveillance-black-activists/
The NY Times reported that the FBI opened more than 80,000 assessments in the first two years after the Attorney General gave it this power: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/us/24fbi.html
