Janet Reitman writes:

By the end of September 2001, [Robert] Mueller told President Bush that Al Qaeda had 331 potential “sleeper” operatives inside the United States. By the following October, intelligence officials were estimating that anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 Al Qaeda terrorists might be hiding within various Muslim communities across the United States. Virtually all of these supposed terrorists turned out to be nonentities — “ghost leads,” as they were called.

The U.S. response to terrorism would eventually take on the contours of a major domestic surveillance operation. It was a radical shift from the F.B.I.’s historical investigative blueprint, and the impact was immediate. “What Mueller did, with the support of President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft, was leverage the fear of another Al Qaeda attack to transform the bureau from a law-enforcement agency into a domestic intelligence agency,” says Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent and author of “Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide,” a 2019 critical analysis of the post-9/11 F.B.I. This new mandate exposed a vast number of people who were not suspected of breaking the law to some of the same intrusive techniques the bureau had long used against people it suspected were criminals. “All of this was done without a clear public discussion of what this development might mean for American freedom and democracy or whether it would actually result in greater security,” he says. “As it turned out, spying on innocent people doesn’t help catch guilty people, so it was a flawed approach.”

[Terry] Albury knew none of this when he arrived at a nondescript F.B.I. facility in Northern Virginia in October 2001 to begin his training as a “foot soldier in the war on terror,” as he and his classmates were told. It was only a few weeks after the attacks, but by the end of that month, Congress would pass the Patriot Act, which gave the F.B.I. unprecedented power to follow and gain the records of financial and communications data of anyone, including American citizens, it believed to be connected to terrorism. A few months after that, Ashcroft rewrote the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines, permitting agents to venture into public spaces and spy on Americans in a manner they had not been able to do since the 1970s. [Continue reading…]