Privacy And Religious Groups Condemn NSA Surveillance Of Muslim Americans

Response to a recent report detailing surveillance of Muslim Americans by the United States government has been swift, and negative. Condemnation has piled up from privacy groups, religious organizations alike.

Delivering on a long-held promise, journalist Glenn Greenwald today published the names of five prominent Muslim Americans who were under governmental surveillance for years.

The group included professors, activists, and even a candidate for political office. It’s precisely the set of people who the government claims to not spy on domestically.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a collection of dozens of religious organizations each criticized the revelations, saying they recalled previous decades that saw governmental overreach into the private lives of activists.

The FBI, implicated in the report, is infamous for its surveillance and abuse of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The agency went as far as to mail him an anonymous letter urging suicide. Given that track record, the number of American targets on the list that Greenwald published is troubling.

Greenwald’s report, published on The Intercept, contained thousands of surveillance targets, hundreds of which were Americans. Thousands more were marked as “unknown,” regarding their citizenship.

The EFF’s statement is plain:

EFF unambiguously condemns government surveillance of people based on the exercise of their First Amendment rights. The government’s surveillance of prominent Muslim activists based on constitutionally protected activity fails the test of a democratic society that values freedom of expression, religious freedom, and adherence to the rule of law.

The collected religious groups’ letter, also signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands a “full public accounting” of the material published, and calls for stronger privacy protections. The letter directly alleges that the government is “targeting entire communities — particularly American Muslims—for secret surveillance based on their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin.”

The letter also cites a lack of knowledge due to excessive government secrecy, For a first step, it asks that the government provides “the public with the information necessary to meaningfully assess the First Look report.” That seems unlikely.

Amnesty International added to the criticism, calling the surveillance of the five “apparently arbitrary,” and demanding “comprehensive surveillance reform legislation” to pass.

The Department of Justice, in a released comment, stated that it “is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights.”

Lawmakers and the White House did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publishing.

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