A federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU earlier this week charges the FBI with violating the religious freedom rights of three Muslim-American plaintiffs through an indiscriminate investigation of mosques in Southern California. A paid informant was instructed to gather personal information on attendees, the suit alleges, merely because they are adherents of Islam.
The FBI…used him to indiscriminately collect personal information on hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent Muslim Americans in Southern California. Over the course of fourteen months, the agents supervising this informant sent him into various Southern California mosques, and through his surveillance gathered hundreds of phone numbers, thousands of email addresses, hundreds of hours of video recordings that captured the interiors of mosques, homes, businesses, and the associations of hundreds of Muslims, thousands of hours of audio recording of conversations…as well as recordings of religious lectures, discussion groups, classes, and other Muslim religious and cultural events occurring in mosques.
This dragnet investigation did not result in even a single conviction related to counterterrorism. This is unsurprising, because the FBI did not gather the information based on suspicion of criminal activity, instead it gathered the information simply because the targets were Muslim.
The suit seeks class action status, asks for all information gatherer as a result of this investigation to be destroyed, and requests damages for violations of the law.
