Washington ? Who’s keeping tabs on your Internet chat? Who’s in the next pew or on the next prayer rug? Who’s got their eye on you at the library?

Could be the FBI, under rules announced Thursday that give agents more leeway in domestic spying just about anywhere that people congregate publicly including cyberspace.

FBI Director Robert Mueller, left, speaks to reporters about a new policy paring restrictions on domestic spying. The policy, announced Thursday in Washington, gives the FBI broad authority to monitor Internet sites, libraries, churches and political organizations for clues to terror plots. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is pictured in the background.

That makes some people uneasy, but others say law-abiding citizens have no reason to fear, reflecting the ambivalence that many people have felt since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“That’s a difficult one,” said Mo Bey, pondering the new FBI guidelines before heading into the Islamic Center of Washington for prayers. “I don’t think that citizens should be violated because of their religious affiliations. But Americans need to be attentive to terrorist movements.”

Librarians, Internet surfers and other people expressed similar feelings of disquiet about someone monitoring them even if their activity is right out in public.

“There could be agents in the library looking at what people are reading, looking over someone’s shoulder while they’re on the Internet,” said Emily Sheketoff of the American Library Assn. “What I’m afraid of as an American citizen is that they’re going to look at the kinds of magazines I subscribe to and the kinds of things I’m interested in and use that as probable cause” to investigate further.

Armed with its new authority, the FBI could have gotten an eyeful Thursday if agents had poked around the Internet checking comments that people posted on electronic bulletin boards.

	KU library policyStella Bentley, dean of libraries at Kansas University, said she didn’t expect the new FBI policies on searches at libraries to affect policies at KU.”It shouldn’t change anything,” she said. “We share circulation records only if they have a subpoena.”Bentley said that policy was basically universal throughout libraries. And even then, she said, the library didn’t keep records long.

“The march to a police state goes on,” complained one.

“I thought there was a set of laws protecting citizens against this sort of thing, such as The Bill of Rights,” said another.

“I don’t see any problem here,” said a third. “So they can go to any public place you and I can go. Why is that a problem?”

Picking up fares on the streets of Washington, taxi driver Mazaffar Raja, who emigrated from Karachi, Pakistan, said he just wants to be able to worship in peace.

“It doesn’t violate my privacy as long as they don’t disturb the prayer,” he said.

But there were worries the law could be applied selectively to single out mosques, for example, or to spy on people for no good reason.

“We were thinking we were part of this nation,” said Taha Al-Alwani, president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Va. “Now we feel there are things to isolate us from the American community and to look at us in this way, which is unacceptable.”

It wasn’t just Muslims who were concerned.

Russ Siler, an official of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said the government already had plenty of tools to fight terrorism. “We need to be very, very careful when, in the name of protecting our liberties and freedoms, we begin to take those liberties a little too much for granted,” he said.

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention reflected the mixed feelings of many when he said of the new rules: “I would not say it’s a good thing, I would say it’s a necessary thing.”

If it takes monitoring religious sites, among others, to find suspected terrorists, “so be it,” he said. “I don’t see why churches should be exempt from the law.”

Still, Land added, “I would hope that the FBI would make it clear that these are temporary measures and that once the state of emergency that we now face is over, that they would return to guidelines that are more in keeping with normal times.”

Ghazi Khankan, interfaith affairs director of the Islamic Center of Long Island and a leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said it would be good for the FBI to visit mosques and see that Muslims are peace-loving people. In fact, he said his group 10 days ago had written to the FBI’s New York office inviting officials to visit.

At the same time, he worried aloud that if the FBI used its new authority to focus “on one particular community, then it is wrong and then we would speak against it.”

For some people, unease about the government going too far stemmed from memories of abuses in decades past.

“It depends on how you do it,” said John Kupcinski, a college student at the University of Maryland in College Park, recalling the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI excesses and Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. “We don’t want the government to now say, ‘You’re a terrorist. You’re a terrorist.”‘