TexasCHLforum.com

Most of what is going to be allowed has long been legal, just forbidden by FBI policy. They will now allow things that are legal for any other police agency, such as going through a person's trash or running their names in law enforcement databases. I really do not have a problem with these changes as general policy changes.

The big difference is the one I have a problem with. They will now be able to do this without first opening a case or making a record of it. This will open them up to the very same types of abuse they have arrested other police officers for. Running the same person once per week to because they want to find anything they can use against the person for example, or running a car and using the database to track down the name and contact information for some member of the opposite sex. And I know they have arrested officers for running people as informal background checks for others (like the apartment complex manager checking a potential tenant).

When there is a case required and a record of each person run each time, there is significantly less chance for abuse than the proposed new system (as written by the paper anyway).