{"id":129534,"date":"2014-07-10T19:42:21","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T19:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=129534"},"modified":"2014-07-10T19:42:21","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T19:42:21","slug":"fbi-created-counterterrorism-files-plaintiffs-innocuous-activities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/fbi-created-counterterrorism-files-plaintiffs-innocuous-activities\/","title":{"rendered":"FBI created counterterrorism files for plaintiffs\u2019 innocuous activities"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit today challenging the legality of the federal government\u2019s controversial Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of California, the national ACLU, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, was brought on behalf of five Americans who had their information entered into law enforcement databases for innocent things like taking pictures, buying computers, or standing in a train station, and were then subjected to investigation.<\/p>\n

\"fbi_wiretap\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThis domestic surveillance program wrongly targets First Amendment-protected activities, encourages racial and religious profiling, and violates federal law,\u201d said Linda Lye, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. \u201cThe Justice Department\u2019s own rules say that there should be reasonable suspicion before creating a record on someone, but the government\u2019s instructions to local police are that they should write up SARs even if there\u2019s no valid reason to suspect a person of doing anything wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Justice Department regulation dating to 1978 prohibits the collection and dissemination of \u201ccriminal intelligence information\u201d unless there is \u201creasonable suspicion\u201d of criminal activity. However, the Justice Department\u2019s standard for SARs doesn\u2019t require reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, only behavior that \u201cmay be indicative\u201d of terrorism planning \u201cor other illicit intention.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have learned that such a low bar can cover virtually anything. James Prigoff is an 86-year-old renowned photographer of public art who has lectured at numerous universities and had his work exhibited at the Smithsonian and other museums around the world. In 2004, he was in Boston taking pictures of a famous piece of public art called the Rainbow Swash, which is painted on a natural gas storage tank. Private security guards told him to stop. Several months later, the FBI went to Prigoff\u2019s home in Sacramento to question him about his activities in Boston and also contacted at least one neighbor about him \u2014 a clear indication that a report identifying him as a suspicious person with a potential connection to terrorism had been written and distributed nationwide.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll I was doing was taking pictures in a public place, and now I\u2019m apparently in a government terrorism database for decades,\u201d said Prigoff. \u201cThis is supposed to be a free country, where the government isn\u2019t supposed to be tracking you if you\u2019re not doing anything wrong. I lived through the McCarthy era, and I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy careers and lives. I am deeply troubled that the SAR program may be recreating that same climate of false accusation and fear today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another plaintiff, Wiley Gill, was the subject of a 2012 SAR that was obtained by the ACLU of California through a Public Records Act request. He was identified as a \u201cSuspicious Male Subject in Possession of Flight Simulator Game.\u201d At the time, he was likely looking at websites on his computer about video games. The SAR identifies Gill as \u201cworthy of note\u201d because he converted to Islam and has a \u201cpious demeanor.\u201d<\/p>\n

The SAR was submitted to one of the nation\u2019s 78 \u201cfusion centers,\u201d which are operated by state and local government agencies and are meant to collect and analyze threat-related information. If an analyst believes that a report meets the SAR program\u2019s standards, he or she uploads it to one or more national databases, where it can remain for up to 30 years. In the case of Gill, the SAR was forwarded to the FBI, which then opened a file on him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only reason that someone deemed Mr. Gill \u2018suspicious\u2019 is because he is a devout Muslim, not because he has done anything wrong,\u201d said Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus attorney Nasrina Bargzie. \u201cWith such a lax standard it\u2019s not surprising that the result is religious profiling of this nature. Racial and religious profiling of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities needs to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, a U.S. Government Accountability Office\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0found that the SAR program had failed to demonstrate any arrests, convictions, or thwarted threats, even though tens of thousands of SARs have been uploaded to government databases. In 2012, a bipartisan Senate subcommittee\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0found that fusion centers have not identified a single terrorist threat, and that similar intelligence reporting \u201cpotentially endangered the civil liberties or legal privacy protections of the U.S. persons they mentioned.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe SAR program is an intrusion into the privacy of citizens and is unwarranted,\u201d said Jonathan Loeb, co-lead counsel in the lawsuit and a partner at Bingham McCutchen. \u201cFurthermore, the program was implemented without the appropriate notice and opportunity for the public to comment.\u201d<\/p>\n

No changes to the SAR program have been made since the GAO and Senate reports were issued, despite repeated calls from a\u00a0coalition of civil rights and other organizations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s complaint is at:
\naclu.org\/national-security\/gill-v-doj-complaint<\/a><\/p>\n

Detailed descriptions of the plaintiff\u2019s experiences are at:
\naclu.org\/files\/assets\/sar_complaint.pdf#page=21<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost two thousand Suspicious Activity Reports obtained by the ACLU of California and released in 2013 are at:
\naclu.org\/blog\/national-security-technology-and-liberty\/government-spying-you-aclu-releases-new-evidence<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

###<\/div>\n
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conserves America’s original civic values working in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in the United States by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n

CONTACT:\u00a0ACLU<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit today challenging the legality of the federal government\u2019s controversial Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of California, the national ACLU, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, was brought on behalf of five Americans who had their information entered into law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-129534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}