By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:25pm
Yesterday NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting released the results of an investigation into "suspicious activity" reports (SAR) at the Mall of America in Minnesota. What they found was that the private "counterterrorism" guards at the mall had stopped and questioned on average up to 1,200 people each year, and that at least 125 people were the subject of SAR, many of which were forwarded to the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or the Minnesota fusion center.
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:34pm
Yesterday, two important news stories demonstrated how new unchecked surveillance programs we've highlighted in our Spyfiles campaign are violating the constitutional rights of innocent Americans.
The first, a New York Timesarticle revealed that from March 2009 to March 2011, the FBI opened an eye-popping 82,325 investigations called "assessments," which agents can open against individuals or groups without any evidence of wrongdoing. Not surprisingly, based on the low threshold for opening these inquiries, only 3,315 uncovered any facts to justify further investigation. No doubt far fewer actually resulted in criminal charges. But all of the information about the 79,000 innocent people investigated during this two-year period can be retained by the FBI forever, despite the fact no one engaged in wrongdoing of any kind.
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 9:19am
Last week, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman reported on a FBI document released through an ACLU document request that the agency uses to train new recruits on best practices for “successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E. [Middle East].” As Ackerman concludes, the training document “presents much information that has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with constitutionally-protected religious practice and social behavior.”
Last month,The New York Times reported that Bush administration officials attempted to "gather sensitive information" to discredit Professor Cole because he was a vocal critic of the Iraq War and the Bush administration on his blog, Informed Comment. Glenn Carle, a former CIA agent, alleged in the Times article that he had seen a memo written by his supervisor, David Low, intended for the White House that contained "derogatory details" about Professor Cole.
