No NSA Reform Can Fix The American Islamophobic Surveillance Complex
Muslim Americans likely make up the bulk of US domestic spy targets. This is what it's like for innocent citizens to live in fear
Arun Kundnani
theguardian.com, Friday 28 March 2014 11.02 EDT
Better oversight of the sprawling American national security apparatus may finally be coming: President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee unveiled plans this week to reduce bulk collection of telephone records. The debate opened up by Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing is about to get even more legalistic than all the parsing of hops and stores and metadata.
These reforms may be reassuring, if sketchy. But for those living in so-called "suspect communities" – Muslim Americans, left-wing campaigners, "radical" journalists – the days of living on the receiving end of excessive spying won’t end there.
How come when we talk about spying we don't talk about the lives of ordinary people being spied upon? While we have been rightly outraged at the government's warehousing of troves of data, we have been less interested in the consequences of mass surveillance for those most affected by it – such as Muslim Americans.
In writing my book on Islamophobia and the War on Terror, I spoke to dozens of Muslims, from Michigan to Texas and Minnesota to Virginia. Some told me about becoming aware their mosque was under surveillance only after discovering an FBI informant had joined the congregation. Others spoke about federal agents turning up at colleges to question every student who happened to be Muslim. All of them said they felt unsure whether their telephone calls to relatives abroad were wiretapped or whether their emails were being read by government officials.
There were the young Somali Americans in Minnesota who described how they and their friends were questioned by FBI agents for no reason other than their ethnic background. Some had been placed under surveillance by a local police department, which disguised its spying as a youth mentoring program and then passed the FBI intelligence on Somali-American political opinions.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/nsa-reform-american-islamophobic-surveillance-complex
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