Report: U.S. Spied on Prominent Muslim Americans

The NSA and FBI monitored the emails of five well-known Muslim Americans between 2002-2008, according to a new report based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The Intercept, a news organization started by the journalist who first broke the Snowden story, reports that a government spreadsheet detailing the email addresses of monitored citizens was included in “FISA recap,” which refers to the secretive court that approves wiretapping and other intelligence activities.

Among the 7,485 email addresses listed on the spreadsheet are those of Faisal Gill, who served as an intelligence policy adviser in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush; Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor at Rutgers University; Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the U.S.; Asim Ghafoor, a lawyer who has represented clients in terrorism cases; and Agha Saeed, a former political science lecturer at California State University.

The five have denied any connection with terrorist organizations and do not have criminal records.

The office of the Director of National Intelligence denied the report Wednesday.

“It is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights,” the office said in a statement. “Unlike some other nations, the United States does not monitor anyone’s communications in order to suppress criticism or to put people at a disadvantage based on their ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation or religion.”

Faisal Gill, who was accused of falsifying records in the mid-2000s to gain his security clearance but was later cleared by the Department of Homeland Security, found it “troubling” that the NSA was monitoring his Yahoo! and AOL email accounts.

“I just don’t know why. I’ve done everything in my life to be patriotic,” Gill told Intercept. “I think that certainly goes to show how we need to shape policy differently than it is right now,” he added.

Although the ODNI denied the report, the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment. The Intercept says the reasons why the five were monitored remain unknown.