The FBI has engaged in vast surveillance operations that involves unconstitutional racial profiling and "mapping" of American communities across the country, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.
"The FBI has targeted communities for investigation not based on suspicion of a crime, but on crude stereotypes," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. Shamsi said documents released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request "confirm our worst fears" about the FBI targeting communities on the basis of identity and association rather than evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Communities surveilled on the basis of race, religion and national origin range from African-Americans in Georgia to Arab-Americans in Michigan, the ACLU said on a conference call with reporters. The FBI told the New York Times that it does not base investigations "solely" on factors like ethnicity or religion, though Bush-era investigative guidelines long-criticized by civil libertarian groups but retained by the Obama administration allow agents to consider those qualities when deciding whether or not to start investigations.
The documents obtained by the ACLU also include more anti-Muslim and anti-Arab training materials, including an outline of a 2003 training course in San Francisco that states: "Islam was not able to change the cluster Arab mind thinking into a linear one" and declares, laughably and inaccurately, that "to be in an Islamic Sunni terrorist organization, you must be a Muslim Brotherhood member.