ACLU: FBI’s ‘Community Outreach’ Illegally Spying on Religious Communities
Secretly Collecting, Storing Info on People the Program Meets With
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) new documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI has been using its “Community Outreach” program to conduct illegal spying on religious communities.
The FBI touts the program as an effort to “improve our understanding of the communities we serve and the threats they face.” The program was supposed to reduce suspicion of the FBI in those communities after years of surveillance controversies.
Ironically, the FBI has been using the program itself for that same sort of surveillance, secretly collecting and storing information on the people they met with, using a “mosque outreach” to collect the names of Muslims and attending a “career day” at an Assyrian community center to question community members about their charitable activities and political opinions.
The Privacy Act explicitly forbids the FBI from keeping records of this sort, noted the ACLU, saying that the law was meant to prevent the FBI from keeping track of how Americans exercise their freedom of speech and association.
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David762
December 2nd, 2011 at 10:15 pm
I'm shocked … shocked, I tell you, that the FBI would ever engage tactics like "Community Outreach" to infiltrate and surveil religious organizations.
Oh, wait!
Wasn't the FBI founded to break up the labor unions, the left-of-center political parties, and repress any backlash against the newly created Federal Reserve System? Doesn't COINTELPRO ring any bells of alarm? Or Ruby Ridge? Or the Branch Davidians at Waco, TX? How was the FBI so prescient as to have agents standing by to scoop up the surveillance tapes from cameras pointed toward the Pentagon on 9/11/2001 within minutes, that could have shed light upon exactly what struck that building if only those tapes were made public?
As far as the FBI maintaining records on their illegal investigations of American citizens, why would the FBI relinquish their economic & political power of blackmail accrued under the over-long leadership of J. Edgar Hoover? Does no one remember File-gate? Aren't all Federal agencies, including the US Congress, above the law? Is any American citizen, post-9/11/2001 & the PATRIOT Act, still drinking That 'kool-aid'? Say it isn't so …
Harry
December 3rd, 2011 at 5:26 am
Apparently the main outcome of this program has been an improved understanding of the FBI by the religious communities. I understand some of the mosque members have even started asking agents for secret decoder rings and patterns for red dresses.