Who Else Is Spying on Me?’ Muslim Americans Bring the Fight Against Surveillance to the Supreme Court
(TIME.COM) Imam Yassir Fazaga remembers the panic he felt. He remembers opening up the electrical sockets in his office and searching behind his computer monitor, looking for recording devices. In conversations with congregants, especially unfamiliar ones, he had doubts. “Who else is an informant? Who else is spying on me?” he recalls thinking.
It was the mid-2000s, and Fazaga had just learned that in the years after 9/11, the FBI had sent a man to spy on the community at his mosque in Mission Viejo, Calif., where Fazaga was the religious leader. The informant, a man with a criminal history who had worked for the FBI for years, had recorded hundreds of hours of audio and video conversations and helped the bureau listen in on private conversations between congregants and their spiritual advisors, according to allegations made in court documents. He’d even gone so far as to propose to two other community members that “we should bomb something.”
