WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday released records it obtained from the FBI that it said showed the bureau’s San Francisco division used its Muslim outreach efforts to collect intelligence on religious activities protected by the Constitution. Under the U.S. Privacy Act, the FBI is generally prohibited from maintaining records on how…
SAN FRANCISCO–Reports obtained by the ACLU show agents gathered intelligence under the guise of outreach programs and shared it with other agencies. A legal expert calls the practice ‘outrageous.’ Federal agents routinely profiled Muslims in Northern California for at least four years, using community outreach efforts as a guise for compiling intelligence on local mosques,…
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today expressed concern about the “chilling effect” on constitutionally-protected activities that may result from the apparent use of FBI community outreach efforts to secretly gather intelligence on American Muslim communities, groups and individuals. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “the FBI is using its…
Obama, once a critic of the state secrets doctrine, has invoked it repeatedly. But critics say his latest use of Bush’s favorite get-out-of-court-free card is different. The state secrets privilege—perhaps the most powerful weapon in the government’s legal arsenal—has a complicated history. For years, Democrats, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, accused the Bush administration of overusing…
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California is demanding via federal court that the FBI release docusments on its surveillance of Muslim groups and mosques in the area. Earlier this year, 46-year old father of three Craig Monteih said that he worked as an FBI informant and given the task to uncover suspected terrorist…
