Excerpt:
In a much-discussed story published this week on The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain highlight the cases of five Muslim American leaders whose e-mails have been monitored by the U.S. government "under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies." Information on the surveillance came from none other than Edward Snowden, whose mammoth document dump has been fueling investigative journalism in the United States for 13 months.
The Greenwald-Hussain story focuses on Muslim Americans who appear to be ill-advised targets of government surveillance. As the story notes, "none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press" — a claim that Greenwald & Co. vetted "endlessly," Greenwald told the Erik Wemple Blog in an interview earlier this week. The five people profiled in the story are Faisal Gill, a Republican who served in President Bush's Department of Homeland Security; Asim Ghafoor, a lawyer who has worked on terrorism-related cases; Hooshang Amirahmadi, a Rutgers University professor; Agha Saeed, a former professor at California State University; and Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which sticks up for the civil rights of Muslims.