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.