Adel Daoud is no Ferris Bueller.

A Chicago suburban teen, he couldn’t drive himself to the Jewel Osco grocery store down the street without getting lost, let alone pull a Bueller and hoodwink his parents into letting him have the day off school. He is a D student and forgetful in the extreme. “He’s not a person with a complete mind,” his mother told me.

Yet the FBI began targeting Daoud as a terrorist mastermind shortly after his 18th birthday. At the time the FBI began its sting operation, Daoud wasn’t part of a terrorist cell, nor was any group recruiting him. He was, though, on the Internet, looking for answers about Islam and jihad. At home and at his local mosque, the Muslim teen was told that jihad was nonviolent: It meant supporting your family by being a good son. FBI undercover employees, finding Daoud online, did not affirm that message. Instead, they worked with Daoud, ultimately driving him to downtown Chicago to detonate a weapon of mass destruction outside a bar.

Chicago’s Muslim communities were stunned by the Daoud’s arrest in September 2012. For many, the first question was why. Why target as a terrorist-in-waiting a teen who was plainly incapable of planning and conducting a terrorist attack? The second question was one of fear: Will my child be the FBI’s next target?

As a report released today by Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute documents, the FBI’s tactics in some terrorism sting cases are not only abusive but counterproductive. They instill fear of law enforcement instead of mutual trust. And they potentially divert FBI resources from actual terrorism threats.

Sting operations are nothing new, but the FBI is using significantly more aggressive tactics in American Muslim communities than it has in others. It is deploying informants and undercover FBI agents to mosques and community centers around the country in what sometimes appear to be virtual fishing expeditions. In some cases, the FBI has instructed informants to strike up conversations about jihad with anyone who will listen.

These investigations appear to pick off the lowest-hanging fruit, including the mentally ill and the poor, who are vulnerable to manipulation. In one case, the subject of “The Newburgh Sting,” an HBO documentary premiering this week, an informant promised a 45-year-old African-American man $250,000 to participate in a fake attack. After losing his job at Walmart, the man accepted the offer.