NSA Spied on Muslim-Americans
According to National Security Agency (NSA) documents that Edward Snowden stole from the NSA and released to selected journalists, the agency spied on Muslim-Americans.
Targets of the spying included Faisal Gill, a Republican Party political figure who once worked in the administration of President George W. Bush and held a top=secret security clearance; Asim Ghafooor, an attorney who had represented clients in terrorism-related cases; and Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). An NSA spreadsheet listed 7,485 email addresses that had been monitored between 2002 and 2008.
The first stories based on the Snowden-released documents appeared on June 5, 2013, and continued for two years. Two years after he released the documents, Snowden was an exile in Russia and wanted in the U.S. on criminal charges. But he was also speaking around the world via telecommunications arrangements, and was widely credited with helping spur the first law scaling back surveillance by the U.S. government on June 2, 2015. See the story on Snowden in exile (May 20, 2015).
Get the full story about Snowden: Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (2014)
Learn more; documents and analysis of the Snowden/NSA documents at the National Security Archive: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB436/
Watch the acclaimed film about Snowden: Citizenfour (2014)