Wednesday, July 9, 2014

BREAKING: Glenn Greenwald on US Monitored Emails of American Muslims

Glen Greenwald is out with a story reporting that leaked Edward Snowden documents show that the US government has been spying on American Muslims. Greenwald writes:
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.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act....

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.
The full Greenwald report is here.

RW note: If this is Greenwald's "Big Story" I am unimpressed. Although reprehensible from my perspective, the average American is not going to give two hoots about 5 American Muslims that have been spied upon by the NSA. Where is Snowden showing us how easy it would be for NSA monitoring to be turned on average non-Muslim Americans? Let's see some Beyonce emails. Some George Soros emails. Some hot lesbian email exchanges by Rachel Maddow.

If anything, the Greenwald expose suggests that NSA monitoring is extremely limited. It looks to me as possible more limited hangout by the government, so that this monitoring can be conducted more openly and aggressively.

UPDATE

Greenwald tweets:

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