Muslims attend afternoon Friday prayers at the Muslim Mosque on June 10, 2005 in Lodi, California. | Getty Backtalk The FBI Needs to Stop Spying on Muslim-Americans A new federal program pretends to ‘intervene’ in U.S. Muslim communities when what it’s really doing is flagrant profiling.

Arjun Singh Sethi is a writer and lawyer and director of Law and Policy at The Sikh Coalition. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he specializes in policing, counter-terrorism and law enforcement abuse. He can be followed at @arjunsethi81.

Two days after the attacks in Brussels, a “senior law enforcement official” revealed to Politico Magazine that the FBI is beta-testing “Shared Responsibility Committees," a new program to thwart radicalization and counter violent extremism in Muslim-American communities.

The officer’s statements marked the very first time that the FBI has publicly acknowledged the Shared Responsibility Committee program, which—in my view—is overreaching, ineffective and stigmatizes Muslim-Americans. No news release or formal announcement from the FBI has ever mentioned it. Politico described the program as an intervention strategy through which a specially selected group of mental health professionals, school officials and religious and community leaders are requested by the FBI to help individuals who are at risk of becoming violent extremists.


But while the FBI should be lauded for considering intervention as an alternative to prosecution, SRCs are not the right way to go. I know because I was invited by the FBI to review the details of the program on two separate occasions in both the summer and fall of 2015.

In practice, SRCs aren’t interventionist at all; they’re simply an effort to expand and entrench the FBI’s growing network of confidential informants in the Muslim-American community. Members of these committees have their own biases, receive little to no training and certainly aren’t equipped to ferret out violent extremism or distinguish between extremism, which is constitutionally protected, and violent extremism, which is punishable under the law. The only thing that is certain is that SRCs will serve as an extension of law enforcement and provide another set of intrusive eyes and ears in an already marginalized community.

A typical SRC is city-based and consists of a community leader, religious figure, mental health professional and educator, all of whom sign a multi-page memorandum of understanding with the FBI memorializing the terms of their service. Here’s how they work. The FBI opens an investigation into an individual they believe is at risk of becoming a violent extremist. If the FBI determines that intervention can help the individual stave off violent extremism, the SRC will contact the individual and schedule a series of meetings and consultations. The SRC will then recommend to the FBI that they either drop or continue the investigation, depending on whether the individual has been rehabilitated. The FBI can then accept the committee’s recommendation or ignore it based on either the SRC’s findings or the FBI's own internal investigation. At this time, it is unknown how many SRCs have been created or where they operate; the FBI has revealed only that SRCs are being piloted in certain, undisclosed cities.

There are two details regarding the program that the FBI has never disclosed, despite repeated inquiries from me and others who had the chance to preview the program. First, the FBI never specified the criteria necessary for opening an investigation. We know that law enforcement previously has scrutinized Muslim-Americans who’ve placed large purchase orders for computers at Best Buy, researched video games online, and purchased pallets of water. We also know that the National Security Agency and the FBI covertly monitored the emails of at least several prominent Muslim-Americans, including civil rights leaders, professors and a one-time candidate for public office, despite them having no connection to terrorism or criminal wrongdoing. We likewise know that the U.S. government can add an individual to its master terrorist watchlist based on a single Facebook post, and that Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a population of less than 100,000 and known for its large Arab-American community, has more watchlisted residents than any other city in the United States, except New York. Given this history of overreach, there is little reason to believe that those being investigated even require intervention.

Second, the FBI refused to specify the techniques and practices they use to initiate and further ongoing investigations. In December 2014, the Department of Justice explicitly sanctioned massive data-gathering programs to map Muslim-American communities in connection with “an authorized intelligence or investigative purpose.” The DOJ has nowhere defined these ambiguous terms. The DOJ also sanctioned the use of confidential informants to spy on Muslim-Americans and infiltrate their places of worship absent any connection to wrongdoing. Law enforcement and the intelligence community have also used over-inclusive and sweeping programs like suspicious activity reporting and NSA data collection to both open and advance investigations into Muslim-Americans, and entrapment to convict Muslim-Americans. Social media monitoring and predictive policing have become commonplace investigatory tools as well. Thus, SRCs may be contributing to investigations that are built on abusive and overreaching techniques.

Even when an FBI investigation is meritorious and based on fair policing, SRCs are likely to fail because they have little authority. The FBI is permitted to monitor individuals during an SRC intervention and ignore an SRC recommendation to conclude an investigation. The FBI is likewise permitted to limit what it shares with the SRC. The FBI could thus use a confidential informant at the same time that it deploys an SRC and not disclose it to the SRC. In contrast, the FBI is permitted to seize any notes taken by SRC religious leaders and mental health professionals during the course of an intervention, records that would typically be protected from disclosure under various recognized legal privileges. In addition, SRC members can be subpoenaed to testify at a suspect’s trial, and the FBI refuses to immunize or indemnify SRC members from either criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit filed by the suspect.

SRCs are just the latest example in a series of failed programs to counter violent extremism—programs that are based on bad science, stigmatize Muslim-Americans and chill constitutionally protected activities. In 2014, for example, the FBI launched pilot programs in Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis in which Muslim-American community and religious leaders were asked to proactively identify individuals likely to support or become violent extremists based on warning signs of radicalization, including “becoming confrontational,” “unexpected clashes over ideological differences,” “traveling to a conflict zone overseas” or “a new interest in watching or sharing violent material.” The program alienated Muslim-Americans and turned trusted community leaders into confidential informants. Constitutionally protected activities like growing a beard, deciding to wear a hijab, protesting U.S. foreign policy or joining a Muslim organization were sometimes construed as early indicators of violent extremism and reported to law enforcement.

More recently, the FBI launched a Web portal, “Don’t Be A Puppet,” which seeks the assistance of educators, teachers and students to identify individuals who are at risk of becoming violent extremists. The program’s list of indicators include “talking about traveling to places that sound suspicious,” “using code words or unusual language” and “studying or taking pictures of potential targets.” Muslims, Arabs and South Asians who dare to speak a foreign language, travel abroad to visit their families or holy sites in the Middle East or take photos of major tourist attractions run the risk that they’ll be construed as future terrorists.

The resources and energy devoted to these programs are incommensurate with the threat posed by Muslim violent extremism. Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by a right-wing, violent extremist than by a Muslim violent extremist, and many, many times more likely to be killed by gun violence than violent extremism generally. And yet, the government doesn’t seem concerned with either gun violence or violent extremism arising from non-Muslim communities.

Instead their gaze is myopically focused on Muslim-Americans. We spy on the many to catch the few. We target based on faith, not evidence of wrongdoing. And we beta-test their communities without rigorous public discussion or official announcement. When it comes to Muslim-Americans, it’s clear that anything goes.