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NSA Spied On U.S. Muslims Like ‘Hoover Did On MLK’

Giuseppe Macri Tech Editor
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Journalist Glenn Greenwald will soon reveal large-scale National Security Agency surveillance of American Muslims detailed in documents leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Muslims  targets were “subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told the Aspen Ideas Festival Wednesday, The Atlantic reports.

Romero declined to elaborate on the forthcoming disclosure or its projected publication, and explained that writing the story was difficult because its source material was pulled from a database — not presentation slides similar to other leaked Snowden documents.

“It will be interesting to see who is on this list but I don’t know,” the director said during a panel question-and-answer session. “It will be interesting to see if there were members of Congress on this list, what kind of judicial review was provided.”

Romero’s brief description sounds similar to the NYPD’s concentrated surveillance on Muslims in New York City and New Jersey in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — a program that sparked significant outrage among the U.S. Islamic community in 2011, and which investigators admit failed to produce any leads.

The program was discontinued earlier this year, despite a federal court’s ruling that such surveillance was legitimate, legal anti-terrorist activity, and not a violation of the American Muslim community’s civil rights.

Greenwald delayed the publication of what he described as the biggest Snowden story yet — a list of Americans actively targeted by NSA — earlier this week in response to last-minute government claims, presumably about the potential harm the disclosure could inflict.

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