J. Edgar Hoover lives! Even in its final weeks, the Bush administration continues its war on our civil liberties. On Dec. 1, Bush ultra-loyalist Attorney General Michael Mukasey will put into effect his new expanded "Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations." To search for any possibilities of terrorist activities, the FBI can now conduct "threat assessments" – in plain language, investigations – on individuals and organizations without any specific evidence of wrongdoing. No judicial warrants are required as Mukasey and FBI chief Robert Mueller suspend the Fourth Amendment's "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects" – outside their homes as well, and in their use of phones, Internet, et al. Moreover, in the course of searching for patterns of suspicious terrorist links, FBI agents, free from Bill of Rights constraints, can – as in the glory days of J. Edgar Hoover – covertly infiltrate lawful groups, deploy informants and "assess" such potential indentifiers in suspects as race, ethnicity and religion. Ah, but FBI agents, say Mukasey and Mueller, must be careful to "avoid unnecessary intrusions into the lives of law-abiding people." Think about that problem for them. As Anthony D'Amato, professor of Law at Northwestern University, reasonably asks – on the University of Pittsburgh School of Law's website, "Jurist" – "how can the FBI know that anyone is a law-abiding person without making an investigative intrusion into his or her private affairs?" Since there is no judicial supervision, and no requirement that FBI agents begin their "assessments" with any specific evidence of wrongdoing, D'Amato asks, "Do the Guidelines provide any limitations to the powers of the FBI?"....