(RNS) Valerie Caproni, General Counsel for the FBI, has frequently found herself defending FBI surveillance policies that some civil-liberty and religious groups allege unfairly target Muslims, and permit racial and religious profiling, unsupervised investigations and the use of informants inside mosques.

Hired by FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2003, Caproni says the FBI has made unprecedented efforts since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to reach out to Muslim Americans, and to educate agents about Islam. Following are excerpts from an interview; some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Are you concerned that the guidelines allow or encourage religious profiling?

A: The guidelines neither allow nor encourage racial or religious profiling. We go to great lengths to make sure our employees understand that they are not authorized to engage in racial or ethnic profiling, and we repeat that consistently.

But let’s talk about what that really means. If you’ve been told that a bank robber is a white male who’s approximately 50 years old, it’s not racial profiling to reduce your suspect population to white males. You’re not profiling white people; that’s who your suspect is.

Q: Are you worried that using informants could alienate your allies?

A: We’re only as good as the eyes and ears of the people that will talk to us. The last thing we want to do is to alienate communities that have information that’s relevant to us. Our goal is to have a very good, warm trusting relationship with all communities so people will tell us what we need to know.

Q: What about the argument that doing things in the open would yield more results?

A: These guidelines require our people to use the least intrusive alternative that will achieve the goal. So if they can achieve the goal through overt contacts, that’s preferred. But you can’t always. You may have a community that, for whatever reason, is just not going to talk to the FBI in an overt way.

Q: Some groups argue that the guidelines could allow rogue agents to act recklessly. How would the FBI respond?

A: The ability of a rogue agent to go off the deep end is limited. Can I say that we have no rogue agents and no one’s ever going to do anything wrong? No, we’re a big organization with 33,000 employees. But we have cooked into all of this what we think are reasonable controls to make sure that when you move on to more intrusive steps that there are supervisory controls, that people are looking over your shoulders, you’ve got to enter what you’re doing into the case records so that we can follow it.

Q: Critics say many of the behaviors that the guidelines say are indicative of terrorist activity are in fact routine behaviors of pious Muslims.

A: The FBI knows the difference between indicators of terrorist activity and people who are incredibly pious, but not radical. Our work force has come a long way since 9/11 in terms of learning a lot more about Muslims and what Islam is all about, what are the religious obligations. I don’t think our workforce would confuse someone who’s going to the mosque five times a day with someone who is ascribing to a jihadist mentality.

There’s a difference between someone who is religious and someone who has bought into a mentality that says I’m going to blow myself up and I’m going to take people out with me.