Last night Glenn Greenwald published his
latest information about National Security Agency (NSA)
surveillance, naming five Americans of Muslim backgrounds targeted
for e-mail collection. I hesitate to call it a bombshell because I
would predict most folks—whether they agree with the government’s
tactics—probably suspected this was exactly what they were
doing.
I threw up a
link really quickly last night just to draw attention to
Greenwald’s latest. Spending some time to really look over the
information and responses, here’s a few things I think that are
worth taking away from the report that could end up being lost in
the debate.
It’s not just five American targets total. The
file Greenwald is drawing this information from, email surveillance
targets from 2002 to 2008, contained more than 7,000 targets. At
least 200 of them were of American citizens. The five men named and
interviewed by Greenwald were the ones whose names they were able
to figure out from their email addresses. More than 5,000 addresses
don’t identify whether or not the targets are Americans (or they
don’t know) so the number could actually be much higher. Some,
indeed, were terrorism suspects, such as Anwar al-Alwaki, killed in
a drone attack in Yemen in 2011.
One of the targets was suing the federal government for
previous illegal surveillance while he was being monitored
again. Asim Ghafoor served as an attorney representing a
Saudi charity whose assets were frozen over allegations of ties to
Osama bin Laden. During the case in 2004, Ghafoor discovered his
calls were being monitored:
In 2004, during the Al Haramain litigation, the Treasury
Department accidentally provided one of the foundation’s lawyers
with a top-secret call log showing that the government had been
eavesdropping on Ghafoor’s calls with his clients. FBI agents
quickly showed up to retrieve the document, and they took Ghafoor’s
laptop for a week to “scrub” it of any trace of the classified
information. At the time, neither Ghafoor nor Wendell Belew, the
other attorney whose conversations were monitored, knew what to
make of the log. The following year, when James Risen and Eric
Lichtblau of The New York Times
revealed the Bush Administration’s illegal wiretapping program,
Ghafoor realized that his attorney-client conversations had been
surveilled without a warrant.“When I received a document that proved I had been tapped
talking to my clients, I was shocked beyond belief,” Ghafoor
recalls. “It’s like finding out there was a peeping tom. You just
wonder: What else did they violate?”The attorneys and Al Haramain sued the U.S. government, claiming
that the eavesdropping violated their constitutional rights. After
nearly five years of litigation,
Ghafoor was awarded more than $20,000 in damages and the
government was ordered to pay his legal fees of $2.5 million. Those
judgments were later reversed on appeal, on the grounds that the
law does not explicitly entitle those targeted by surveillance to
damages from the government, even if they prove that the
surveillance was illegal.
During this time while Ghafoor was suing the government for
listening to his phone calls with his client, it was also secretly
monitoring his e-mails.
There’s a reason the story focuses on the ethnic
background of the targets (beyond the obvious). Ghafoor
and fellow surveillance target Faisal Gill (a former George W. Bush
administration official) both have represented legal interests of
foreign countries like Sudan. But so have many other Americans,
extremely white Americans like Dick Gephardt and Bob Dole.
Greenwald and reporter Murtaza Hussain could not find any evidence
from the documents that other lawyers at other firms were having
their communications monitored:
While Gill and Ghafoor both ended up being surveilled, none of
the Hunton & Williams lawyers who represented Sudan appear to
be listed in the NSA spreadsheet. Also missing from the list is any
apparent mention of the multitude of American, non-Muslim
politicians who have represented foreign governments, including
former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (Turkey), former Senate
Majority Leader Bob Dole (United Arab Emirates), former Rep.
Bob Livingston (Libya), and former Clinton adviser Lanny Davis
(Honduras post-coup).Under U.S. law, Gill’s legal work for the Sudanese government
could not have been used to justify targeting him for surveillance,
absent any other evidence. “Representation of a foreign government
in legal matters by itself does not make a U.S. lawyer an agent of
a foreign power,” NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said in a statement.
According to the NSA spreadsheet, Gill’s surveillance was
terminated in February 2008.
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.
There’s still more to come! Greenwald and
Hussain participated in a
Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread this morning. A Reddit
participant asked if there were other targeted groups beyond Muslim
leaders. Greenwald responded:
I get in trouble every time I talk about our reporting before
it’s ready, but suffice to say: Muslims, while the prime target of
post-9/11 abuses, are not the only ones targeted by them, and there
is definitely more big reporting to come from the Snowden
archive.
My prediction: the
Occupy folks. We’ve already seen they were targeted for
analysis and poorly managed monitoring by fusion centers.
One of the
responses from unnamed government officials to the report has
been that Greenwald is potentially identifying the names of people
who agreed to become government informants following surveillance.
But from his Reddit chat, Greenwald and Hussain indicate they
contacted these five targets and got permission from them to reveal
their names, even from Amirahmadi.
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