The US Patriot Reauthorization and Improvement Act of 2005, 2003 created a "permanent police state."
CRS summary (pdf)| conference bill (pdf).  

Congress, not Mukasey, created a whole new lexicon, intra-departmental and inter-state authorities, budgets and appointed officers within DoJ and the DNI, and federal crimes, not to mention "miscellanae", to support domestic surveillance online and offline. When the SCOTUS affirmed habeus, Congress simply emended the MCA...Bush has further amended military commission and field manuals to expand executive powers and capital crimes! And the FISA emendment is a small part of the "national security" infrastructure build-out.

So this statement, "He [Mukasey] wants to set up a system where an unknowable quantity like bad intent is the standard for detaining people," is erroneous. An "an unknowable quantity like bad intent," that is the standard operating procedure, blanket warrant, affirmed by Congress again and again. Mukasey is, what, the third AG since the 2000 election. Meanwhile blogger opinions vascillate between surprise that federal and state agents are executing the law and disapproval of "conspiracy theories."

See the latest: This is what happens, when you ignore the actions of your House representative: "Colorado "Fusion Center" to Step Up Intelligence Gathering During DNC; US Northern Command to Play Role"

Mike German, ACLU National Security Policy Counsel, former FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism from 1988 to 2004.
Eileen Clancy, founder of I-Witness Video.
Erin Rosa, reporter, Colorado Independent

ERIN ROSA: OK. Well, to start off with, what we would probably need to do is define what a fusion center actually is. And basically, they're centers meant to facilitate communications between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to share information about, quote-unquote, "suspicious activities," which can include taking pictures or taking notes. The definition is very broad when it's defined by them.
[...]
MIKE GERMAN: Sure. Our report in November was basically hoping to be a warning signal, that we saw some problems with these centers, these fusion centers, that were being created all over the country. And really, what they are is a collaborative effort between not just state, local and federal law enforcement, but also, as in Colorado, involving the military, private sector companies and other non-law enforcement government agencies. ...

Fusion centers sort of started organically around the country. It seemed like state and local law enforcement were frustrated with the Joint Terrorism Task Force's ability to break down the classification rules and actually share information with them, so they started creating their own networks to share state police information. And once the federal government saw those and saw them working, they started pouring in resources and sort of changing the nature of them to really encourage them to--state and local law enforcement authorities and these other entities in the fusion centers--to become intelligence collectors for the intelligence community, the federal intelligence community.
[...]
And, you know, part of the problem is that it's unclear what the rules are. And, you know, when you see something like the CIA participating on these panels and the military involved, it's unclear who's actually in charge, and that's really a large part of the problem that we're seeing as these things are moving forward, because the information is already being collected.

Right after the DNI put out those standards, the Los Angeles Police Department issued an order compelling their officers to report criminal and non-criminal suspicious behavior that can be indicative of terrorism, and they listed sixty-five behaviors. And Erin mentioned some of them, but one warning I'll put out there, because of the early part of this story, one of the precursor behaviors to terrorism that's identified in the order is taking video. And we put in our report a couple of instances where people taking video were stopped by police officers simply for taking pictures or video. And in some cases, particularly where they're taking photographs or video of police, it actually resulted in arrests.
[...]
EILEEN CLANCY: Yeah. There's a document that has been made public before that was compiled by the Secret Service, in charge of the Republican convention in New York City. And the Secret Service is the lead agency for these national special security events, like all the presidential conventions. And the document is a best-practices-and-lessons-learned document that was presented a couple of months after the 2004 convention closed. And it's a PowerPoint presentation, so we don't have a lot of details; it's all bullet points. ...
And what it says here is that through this intelligence fusion center and the Joint Terrorist Task Force fusion center, which is yet another fusion center that was put in place, this subcommittee achieved its primary objective of sharing threat--and then it says, "demonstration intelligence" among the subcommittee members. So, the point here is that the CIA, the Defense Department and the upper reaches of the federal--what they call the intelligence community, believe it or not, they are having access to intelligence, what they call "intelligence" about demonstrations. I might just call it information, but they seem to need to share it. ...

Well, what we saw during the Republican convention in New York was that there was an experimental project, a pilot project, that took spectrum, digital spectrum that's owned by WNET, Channel 13, in New York City, the PBS sort of flagship in New York City, and what they did was they routed a special test for two-way video, so that, say, a police officer could have a camera where he could be videotaping something, and it would go--would be transmitted through the Empire State Building, the transmitter on top of the Empire State Building, and then through a Department of Defense satellite to a server in Virginia that was a military server, and also that they could pass information sort of back and forth. And the thing about this was it's non-line-of-sight, so it was a special kind of technology where the buildings wouldn't get in the way. And that's an example of how the federal government and local governments use the conventions basically as an excuse to make a laboratory to play with these toys and set up surveillance processes that we're going to see sometime in the future.

Is it time yet for more of these influential writers to advocate for an orderly, legal dissolution of Congressional incumbents? Then US could expect repeal.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

On second thought, a 2nd 911 is not needed.  The US is weakened enough that a solid economic DEPRESSION with food/gas lines will have Americans DEMANDING order.  After all, you can't fill your belly with The Constitution.  The fascists will make sure the trains run on time; they have to get to their appointments with their prostitutes.

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

The seemingly endless production line of anti-constitutional legal apparatchiks the republicans serve up no longer remotely surprises me.

More importantly is to ask what it is that the Dems will do to repeal these laws and then set about root and branch reforms of the institutions to ensure this cannot happen again. On this I'm afraid that crickets chirp. despite the regular dissection of republican intentions by bloggers, I hear little or no concern from anybody in the beltway. It's as if they are awed by the spectacle of the supposedly sacrosanct Constitution being ripped to shreds and can't wait for their turn to benefit.

It's not getting rid of Mukasey that matters, it's the absence of concern from the 2009 dems that should terrify you.

keep to the Fen Causeway