Did They Call Wiley Gill “Mohammed Raghead” Before Claiming Videogame Was a Flight Simulator?

The ACLU is suing the Federal Government for the standards it uses in Suspicious Activity Reports, which can record completely innocent actions. A lot of people are citing James Prigoff — an 86-year old photographer and retired business executive, who got tracked to his Sacramento, CA home for taking a picture of a well-known Boston landmark.

But given the denials about the tracking of Muslims in response to the Intercept story on NSA’s surveillance of 5 Muslim leaders, the SAR complaint of of Wiley Gill, a convert to Islam, deserves as much attention.

Gill describes how the cops in Chico, CA, had been tracking him both online and at the local mosque, when they invented the pretense of a domestic violence complaint to search his home without a warrant. They found something on video games loaded on his computer and deemed it a flight simulator.

The SAR was created on or about May 23, 2012, and purports to document an encounter between Mr. Gill and the Chico Police Department (“CPD”) on or about May 20, 2012. The SAR states that a CPD officer was investigating a domestic violence incident and believed the suspect may have fled into Mr. Gill’s residence. The SAR states that this was later discovered to be unfounded. It acknowledges that the CPD officer searched Mr. Gill’s home. The SAR asserts that Mr. Gill’s computer displayed a screen titled something to the effect of “Games that fly under the radar,” which appeared to be a “flight simulator type of game.” The SAR concludes by describing Mr. Gill’s “full conversion to Islam as a young WMA [white, male adult],” “pious demeanor,” and “potential access to flight simulators via the internet” as “worthy of note.”

Admittedly, the bias inherent to Gill’s SAR came from local cops, not the FBI or NSA. But I’d be willing to bet it responded to alerts (FBI and DHS both release them) about white converts to Islam.

The Intercept story, remember, described an internal document referring to targets as “Mohammed Raghead.” NSA has disclaimed any tie to that — even more aggressively than FBI did its own totally racist documents.

And while I presume whatever alerts to local cops led them to track Gill’s non-suspicious behavior said nothing explicitly racist, at some point the system reinforces a system under which Muslims get tracked, and others do not.

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7 replies
  1. P J Evans says:

    They also seem to be unaware that flight simulators are popular computer games. (They’re not designed to be actual flight simulators.)

  2. CTuttle says:

    Mahalo, Marcy…! As I quipped on Kevin’s excellent post

    Damn the Refinery cases with the ‘private security’ shows us just how hardwired Big Oil is with our Intel/MIC apparatchik…! *gah*

    Local cops and Private Security firms are certainly hardwired to all those Fusion centers that dot our landscape…!

  3. Bitter Angry Drunk says:

    If only Gill had formed a corporation before converting. Then he’d be assured religious freedom.

    • Bardi says:

      “If only Gill had formed a corporation before converting. Then he’d be assured religious freedom.”

      Ouch!

      Of course, then, any adulterers working for said corporation could then be stoned, in the “rock meet noggin” sense.

      A question. How does one separate the “intel” aspect from the democracy and, if impossible, how does one raise corporate taxes to pay for this global intrusion as the corporations seem the only real beneficiaries.

  4. orionATL says:

    this is inexcusable treatment of wiley gill.

    but from a social systems standpoint it shows how easily (in terms of justification) our nsa could began co-operating thru fbi, et al., with local police any where in the country. it would take very little for people like wiley gill to be incarcerated for years on a pretext. i think here of the detroit immam (american) assassinated by the fbi in +- 2009, possibly as a favor to local police.

  5. Rosalind says:

    For the Fusion Center Bureaucracy to keep getting its share of the DHS money pie, it must provide results. Results measured in quantity not quality, the employees are tasked with collecting larger & larger number of SARS swept up from every podunk quasi-legal authority. The detritus turned into data to fill out their reports and justify their continued existence. “If you see something, say something”. We continue our transformation into a nation of Citizen Suspects, with Muslims first in line.

  6. hidflect says:

    Video games? Well, that’s all the evidence we need right there! Hope you like Guantanamo guacamole.

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