On July 19, 2018, Georgetown University Law Center hosted a conference entitled "The Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of American Religious Minorities". The conference traced the history of modern surveillance and asked if it was consistent with the intentions of the American founders. Do modern counterterrorism initiatives appropriately protect civil rights and civil liberties? How are local communities, advocates, and artists responding to these challenges? The conference also explored the role of law enforcement and national security surveillance and the relationship between Muslim communities and the government post-9/11.
Now in its third year, "The Color of Surveillance," organized by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, brought together a wide range of speakers, including activists, lawyers, policy advocates, and technologists. Discussions focused on government monitoring and its deep impact on American religious minorities throughout American history. The conference covered different topics from federal interrogations of early Mormons in the Utah territory in the 19th century, to the 20th century surveillance of Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh communities, to modern post-9/11 surveillance systems.
Opening the discussion, Mr. Alvaro Bedoya, the founder and director of the Center on Privacy & Technology began his discussion by mentioning Trump's call for a Muslim ban and highlighted that the call was about surveillance. When Trump said, "we need time to investigate until we figure out what's going on." Bedoya said Trump was talking about surveillance. "Today, we are not looking at the law behind the Muslim ban or its claimed constitutionality instead we'll look at the old and ugly idea behind it that religious minorities are different and dangerous and they need to be investigated and watched," Bedoya said. He also asked many crucial questions such as: how does it feel to be watched? How does it feel to serve your country in uniform only to learn that your country is spying on your mosque because of your religion? How does it feel to volunteer at a charity when you know that the organization is infiltrated by a government informant? These are the questions that speakers and activists tried to answer in different panels and presentations at the conference.
Mrs. Brooke Allen, Professor at Bennington College, made a presentation addressing the idea that the United States is a Christian nation founded on Christian laws. Allen added that the United States was among the first countries in the world to establish a non-religious state where the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prevents Congress from making any law establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Allen finished her presentation by emphasizing that the federal government of the United States is not founded in any sense of Christian religion, rather it is a secular state.
Filmmaker Assia Boundaoui and her mother Rabia Boundaoui talked about their experience as part of a Muslim community in the Chicago suburbs when they realized they were being watched and listened to by the FBI in 1999. After making a film Assia began asking her neighbors and community to share their experience. The film begins with anecdotal evidence of surveillance and it ends with a lawsuit against the DOJ and the FBI for the records of the surveillance where she uncovered tens of thousands of pages. She eventually won the case against the FBI. Assia remembered the first moment when she woke up at 3:00 a.m. and saw a light outside. "I must have been 16," she said. "I got up and looked outside and there were two men on the telephone pole doing something on the wires." Assia also talked about the day when three FBI agents with black suits came to her house asking her mother Rabia questions about her neighbors asserting that the same thing happened to everyone in the community.
Asked about her experience and if she ever thought of giving up since law enforcement usually justifies their surveillance as necessary, Assia replied that "it took a generational difference for this mentality to change, maybe my mother has an immigrant mentality, and a lot of immigrants in my neighborhood thought that if the FBI came to their house, they [shouldn't] make any noise. The next generation feels entitled to their Americanness and they know they have rights and that [surveillance] should not have been happening," she said. Submitting is not the answer, she added. Mass surveillance and specifically profiling ethnic-racial groups is not an effective way of law enforcement and it does not help in solving crimes, explained Assia. Besides, Assia said, in 20 years of surveillance of the community, the FBI never found a single act of terrorism or convicted anyone of terrorist activities.
The conference also hosted another activist who was directly affected by surveillance. Asad Dandia, one of the plaintiffs, led a lawsuit against the NYPD regarding its Muslim surveillance program.
In 2012 when Dandia was 19 years old he decided to raise money and deliver it to poor families. He met with some friends every Friday after the Friday prayer in the mosque in Brooklyn. Dozens of volunteers joined him to help achieve this task. One day, Asad said "a young man contacted me by Facebook, where he wanted to get involved. I introduced him to my friends but he started asking for their phone numbers and if he can come over to their homes." Later on, a friend came to him and asked to be removed from the fundraising group because he was being watched. His friend said "they have photos of all of you". Eventually, the young man who contacted Dandia on Facebook confessed that he was an informant for the New York Police Department. "That is when things really blew up," Asad said.
In June 2013, Dandia filed a lawsuit against NYPD and last year he won the case when he reached a settlement in the lawsuit. In the end, Asad said, "I think that the settlement is a step towards a broader process of seeking justice."
One of the organizations dedicated to ensuring that US national security policies and practices are consistent with the Constitution, human rights, and civil liberties is the ACLU National Security Project. Hina Shamsi the director of the ACLU talked about watch lists or blacklists where several cases and clients were suspected terrorists based on vague and overboard criteria without a meaningful process to defend themselves and clear their names.
In the post 9/11 era, the government has created different kinds of lists. The most famous one is the terrorist screening database that includes 1.2 million records and is managed by the FBI's terrorism screening Center. Through this list, information flows to other subsidiary lists including the no-fly list, where people are banned from flying to work from and over U.S. airspace. But the problem of the no-fly list, Hina said, is that “you would show up at the airport, you would be told publicly in front of other people often by the airline personnel, you cannot fly, there is a security list you are on as a suspected terrorist." Ironically, the U.S. government's policy was not to confirm or deny whether you were on the no-fly list. Another watch list that targeted primarily at Muslims and result in the denial or delay of immigration benefits to people seeking visa or naturalization, Hina confirmed. This list is used to identify people whom they are going to deny visas or passports.
As a result, Hina asserted that "Information from these lists goes to multiple government agencies and is shared based on official acknowledgment of this with [more than] 22 foreign governments," and "depending on the list, [you will be denied] to travel by air or sea, invasive screening, denial of visas, detention and questioning by the U.S. and foreign governments".
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