Word: freeh
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When it comes to drinking on -- or off -- the job, FBI Director Louis Freeh will be merciless. While the CIA's James Woolsey was getting hammered for his agency's leniency toward superspy Aldrich Ames' flagrant drunkenness, Freeh issued a blistering Alcohol Policy memo warning agents that even off-duty misconduct caused by drinking will have "harsh consequences," up to dismissal. Even when drinking moderately at a social function, G-men and -women must arrange for a designated driver. Freeh, says one, is "J. Edgar Hoover with kids...
When FBI director Louis Freeh visited Moscow last month, he told cadets and faculty of the Russian Police College that "one criminal threat looms larger than the others: the theft or diversion of radioactive materials in Russia and Eastern Europe." Organized-crime groups, he warned, would try to obtain such materials "to be offered for sale to the highest bidder." The Russian daily Izvestia makes the same judgment. It reported recently that more than 5,500 criminal gangs were operating in Russia, and "the lion's share of their operations involve stealing fissionable nuclear materials and smuggling them...
...Freeh denies that that's what the government is after, claiming he merely desires better access to court-approved eavesdropping. "My real objective is to get access to the content of telephone calls," he says. And since rapidly advancing communications technologies make it harder to monitor phone conversations, the new approach is necessary, Freeh says...
Still, even if Freeh is telling the truth--and assuming that the proposed surveillance freedoms would not be abused by law enforcement officials down the line--the problems of the so-called privacy improvement act do not end there. It's not just the government we have to worry about...
...technology would also open up a wide array of dangerous opportunities for computer hackers and phone company employees. Freeh plays down that possibility, though he acknowledges that it exists. In any case, he argues, the benefits of the plan, in terms of enhanced law enforcement, outweigh the disadvantages of reduced privacy. Coming from the director of the FBI, that's not an unexpected sentiment...