Rights Advocates Urge Congress to Curb FBI Surveillance Powers

The 19-page report, titled "Can the FBI Spy on the First Amendment?," argues that the memo allows federal agents to treat protected political activity as a precursor to terrorism. Signed in the wake of the assassination of activist Charlie Kirk, the policy directs the FBI's 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate groups critical of the government or capitalism, citing broad categories like "hostility toward traditional American views" as potential indicators of extremism.

Chip Gibbons, policy director at DRAD, warns that the lack of clear guidelines forces individual agents to interpret viewpoint-based threats, often without evidence of criminal wrongdoing. The report highlights cases where the memo has already been invoked, including the indictment of 15 protesters in Minnesota and the conviction of demonstrators in Texas, who received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years. According to defense attorneys, the terrorism charges in these instances were directly enabled by the administration's expanded interpretation of the law.

To address these concerns, the report calls for immediate legislative intervention, including the creation of a formal statutory charter for the FBI and a strict, violence-focused definition of terrorism. Gibbons argues that the agency has long possessed the architecture to monitor political dissent—citing historical examples from the 1960s and the 2003 Iraq War protests—but that the current administration is now actively exploiting these mechanisms to dismantle opposition. The proposed reforms include:

• Establishing a statutory charter to limit the scope of FBI investigations;
• Narrowing the definition of terrorism to prioritize criminal violence over political ideology;
• Ending suspicionless assessments of individuals based on their speech;
• Mandating warrants for foreign intelligence queries under §702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.