As part of a massive request for data under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the American Civil
Liberties Union of Southern California today asked the FBI to turn over
records related to the agency's collection and use of race and ethnicity
data in Southern California communities.
The ACLU fears that under FBI guidelines on domestic
intelligence, agents are engaging in “Muslim mapping.”
]
That is, the bureau is collecting information about businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions to map communities where they believe domestic terror plots could potentially fester.
The ACLU statement on the FOIA request follows . .
ACLU/SC Seeks Records About FBI Collection Of Racial And Ethnic Data
LOS ANGELES – The American Civil
Liberties Union of Southern California today asked the FBI to turn over
records related to the agency's collection and use of race and ethnicity
data in Southern California communities.The request is one of 30 coordinated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by ACLU affiliates in states and the District of Columbia seeking to uncover records from FBI field offices related to the “mapping” of ethnic communities in the U.S.
FBI guidelines on domestic
intelligence, issued in 2008 but released only this year, authorize
agents to collect information about and map so-called “ethnic-oriented”
businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions
in communities with concentrated ethnic populations.“This is a clear example of
'Muslim mapping,'” said Peter Bibring, staff attorney at the ACLU/SC.
“Singling out individuals for investigation, surveillance, and data-
gathering based solely on their religion or ethnicity is profiling, pure
and simple. It's disturbing that federal resources may be used on such
an unconstitutional and ineffective approach.”The ACLU of Southern California helped defeat a similar example of religious and racial profiling in 2007,
when the Los Angeles Police Department launched a program to “map” the
location of local Muslim communities in an effort to pinpoint places
where they thought that potential terrorist cells were likely to be
located. The program was quickly scrapped after it provoked widespread
community outrage and objections from the ACLU/SC and Muslim community
and advocacy groups.The FBI's power to collect, use, and
map racial and ethnic data to assist the FBI's “domain awareness” and
“intelligence analysis” activities is described in the 2008 FBI Domestic
Intelligence and Operations Guide (DIOG). The FBI released the DIOG in
heavily redacted form in September 2009, but a less-censored version was
not made public until January of this year, in response to a lawsuit
filed by Muslim Advocates. Although the DIOG has been in effect for more
than a year and a half, very little information is available to the
public about how the FBI has implemented this authority.“The FBI's mapping of local
communities and businesses based on race and ethnicity, as well as its
ability to target communities for investigation based on supposed racial
and ethnic behaviors, raises serious civil liberties concerns,” said
Michael German, ACLU policy counsel and former FBI agent. “Creating a
law enforcement profile of a neighborhood based on the ethnic makeup of
the people who live there or the types of businesses they run is unfair,
un-American and will certainly not help stop crime.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.