Waiting for Mom Outside a Bathroom Shouldn’t Land You in a Terrorism Database, Lawsuit Argues

One man attempted to take a
photo of a storage tank painted in rainbow colors. One man
attempted to purchase several computers at once. One man had a
flight simulator game operating on his home computer. And one man
was standing around, waiting for his mother outside the bathrooms
of a train station.

All of this behavior drew the attention of the police and landed
the men in databases for engaging in what authorities decided was
suspicious behavior that could potentially indicate terrorist
leanings. They are men who have had what are called suspicious
activity reports (SARs) made up about them and stored in
antiterrorism databases. And now they’re suing, with the help of
the American Civil Liberties Union and the Asian Americans
Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus. Wired
makes note of the lawsuit, filed today in northern
California:

[D]ue to the standards the government uses for determining
suspicious activity that might be related to terrorism, all of the
plaintiffs found themselves written up in reports stored in
counterterrorism databases and were subjected to unwelcome and
unwarranted law enforcement scrutiny and interrogation, according
to the lawsuit.

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

The complaint accuses the police of profiling on the basis of
the backgrounds of the affected men and violating their civil
liberties. The guy with the flight simulation game on his computer?
He was a convert to Islam in Chicago. A police officer deemed him
suspicious on the basis of his reluctance to interact with police
(in Chicago? How could that be?), and on a later occasion, the
officer searched the man’s residence briefly looking for a suspect
in a completely unrelated domestic violence case. The officer noted
he appeared to be accessing a flight simulator game. That was
pretty much all. And so the officer made up a record of his
behavior.

In the train station case, a security officer in California
deemed a man of Middle Eastern descent suspicious on the basis of
him “meticulously” observing his surroundings of the Santa Ana
station, then hanging outside the bathrooms until a woman (wearing
a burqa) exited the restroom and joined him. That woman was his
mother.

Read more about the cases at Wired or read the lawsuit yourself

here. Reason TV’s Paul Detrick recently
won a SoCal Journalism Award for his own investigation of how
similar behavior by authorities in Los Angeles resulted in the
harassment
of a photographer taking pictures of the L.A. subway system.
Watch below: