Spied on for Being Muslim

I wrote this comment for The Nation.

There is a grocery store near my apartment in Brooklyn called the NSA Food Markets (NSA here stands for National Supermarket Association). I joke with my friends that since they’re the NSA, they must know what I’ll be buying and ought to have it bagged and ready for me as soon as I enter.

My little unfunny joke just got unfunnier. The latest of the Snowden revelations is a long story on The Intercept, written by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, about how for years the NSA and FBI spied on Muslim-American leaders, covertly monitoring their e-mail communications under the trumped-up pretext that these men were agents of foreign governments. The Intercept describes a spreadsheet listing 7,485 e-mail addresses (at least 202 of them belonging to US citizens and legal permanent residents) that were monitored between 2002 and 2008. Their story focuses on five prominent Americans on this list: a Navy veteran, a highly respected lawyer, two professors and a civil rights activist.

Besides being male and American, what unites all of these men? It can’t be partisan politics, since they are Democrats and Republicans. It’s not religious conviction, since some are secular and others religious. They are naturalized citizens and first-generation Americans. They have family ties to South Asian, Iran and the Arab world. They have different political outlooks. In fact, the only significant common denominator among the men is their Muslim-sounding names. Don’t believe me? The article lists another document that instructs intelligence personnel on how to properly fill out memos to justify surveillance. In the space where the target’s name would be written, the memo offers a cute placeholder name: “Mohammed Raghead.”

Read the rest here.