World the Week: FBI spied on Muslim activists, Indian American
Washington: According to the documents leaked by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the FBI spied on five prominent Muslim-American activists, including an Indian-origin attorney.
Based on the information provided, online news site The Intercept on July9,2014 said that the NSA and FBI covertly monitored emails of prominent Muslim-Americans under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.
The Intercept said it identified at least five persons, all American citizens, based on their email addresses. These include Indian-origin attorney Asim Ghafoor, who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases; Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative; 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 and Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the US.
