Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain
FirstLook.org
9 Jul 2014
The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies…
…The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.
The spreadsheet shows 7,485 email addresses listed as monitored between 2002 and 2008. Many of the email addresses on the list appear to belong to foreigners whom the government believes are linked to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Among the Americans on the list are individuals long accused of terrorist activity, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.
But a three-month investigation by The Intercept—including interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA process—reveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens…
The complete article, with video, is at FirstLook.org
Related: What You Should Take Away From Glenn Greenwald’s Latest NSA Report
…One of the targets, despite having a Middle Eastern background, doesn’t even identify as Muslim. Hooshang Amirahmadi, who has dual citizenship as an Iranian and an American, says he’s an atheist. But The Intercept notes he opposes sanctions in Iran and attempts to foment regime changes as foreign policy goals. Amirahmadi himself, though, believes he was targeted over his diplomatic connections, not his ethnicity, and declined to be interviewed for the story…
