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March 15, 2024
On International Day To Combat Islamophobia, Muslim Advocates, Muslims for Just Futures, and Lucy Parsons Labs, alongside 62 grassroots, community-based, and advocacy organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for an end to scapegoating of Pro-Palestine protests in order to expand mass surveillance. Movement groups such as US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, Demand Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights, National Immigration Project, 18 Million Rising, United We Dream, Detention Watch Network, Movement for Black Lives, Asian American Legal Defense Education Fund (AALDEF), Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC, Defending Rights and Dissent, Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, Make the Road NY, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, Fight for the Future, Public Accountability Initiative/LittleSis, and numerous other organizations are joining this collective call to action.
Our collective letter calls on Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to protect their constituents from warrantless surveillance by shutting the backdoor search and data broker loopholes before considering any reauthorization of Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
According to a disturbing report from Wired, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner pointed to ceasefire protesters outside Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's house as a basis for keeping open the backdoor search loophole within Section 702 of FISA (slides from his presentation here). Instead of reining in intelligence agencies for rampant, warrantless surveillance of people in the U.S., Chairman Turner is falsely scapegoating protestors to push through 702 reauthorization, undermine reform, and further entrench mass surveillance. These exact narratives have been used repeatedly by the federal government to spy on racial justice protests, broader social justice movements, and civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We strongly reject the use of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism by congressional members to justify keeping the backdoor-search loophole in Section 702 of FISA. We reject the continued use of mass surveillance, which utilizes racist and Islamophobic logics against all of our collective communities. We also reject any “must pass” legislation that reauthorizes FISA and allows for spying on the millions of protestors who have joined marches calling for a permanent ceasefire and an end to the genocide of Palestinians.
People of conscience across the country have publicly demanded an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Palestine. People exercising their First Amendment right to speak out have done so despite overwhelming attempts to silence, de-legitimize and punish them, including through disciplinary action, employer retaliation, doxxing, and police violence. Protestors confronting this backlash are asking their elected officials to show only some of the principled courage they have, by standing up against these blatant attempts to criminalize dissent by enacting meaningful privacy reforms.
Section 702 and related surveillance authorities have been exploited to surveil people nationwide, particularly targeting immigrant and/or BAMEMSA communities. This section of FISA permits intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign individuals, but it has been persistently abused to monitor people in the U.S. since its enactment. It has been used to spy on hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and continues to erode public trust in government institutions. However, Congress has a pivotal opportunity to establish robust privacy protections for people in the United States: over 100 organizations from across the political spectrum have rallied around critical surveillance reforms, and the House Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill containing many of those reforms in December–the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act (“Protect Liberty Act”).
During a Senate hearing last November, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Christine Abizaid, invoked Hamas in a talking point to advocate for the reauthorization of Section 702, perpetuating troubling rhetoric that implicitly links terrorism threats to Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities domestically. BAMEMSA communities face a distressing cycle where political occurrences such as the current moment are used to cast BAMEMSA identity as presumptively threatening in order to justify the unchecked expansion of mass surveillance policies without any oversight, government transparency, or accountability, resulting in harm for all communities. This same cycle enabled the passage of Section 702 and other policies to vastly expand government spying on our communities after 9/11, including the New York Police Department’s notorious Muslim mapping program, NSA and FBI spying on prominent American Muslim activists, and FBI informants sent to embed themselves in mosques and entrap Muslims across the country. We are outraged to see House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner seize on otherwise protected political dissent in the current moment as a pretext to rehash the same racist and Islamophobic narrative.
Declassified court opinions and government audits have revealed that agencies consistently violate the parameters of Section 702 in searching for communications of people in the U.S. These include searches for the communications of community and religious leaders, victims of state violence, members of Congress, and more than 130 participants in racial justice protests during the summer of 2020. Searches were also motivated by racial bias: one search was conducted based on a witness’s report that two men of “Middle Eastern descent” were loading cleaning supplies into a truck. In another instance, a government audit found that an analyst deliberately mislabeled searches for information about people and places in the United States — including searches for local businesses and mosques.
Amidst the current environment where social movements supporting Palestinian lives and liberation are being targeted and repressed at an alarming scale, we urge Congress to oppose any reauthorization of Section 702 without comprehensive privacy safeguards. Our organizations demand Congress:
Close the Backdoor Search Loophole: require a warrant to search for Americans’ communications and other Fourth Amendment-protected information.
Close the Data Broker Loophole: ensure the government cannot continue using data brokers to buy its way around the Fourth Amendment.
Reject any rhetoric or narrative linking Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities to national security threats and fueling mass surveillance policies.
BAMEMSA communities have been irreparably harmed by mass surveillance policies that have been expanded over the past 22 years since 9/11 as part of the “War on Terror.” Failure to rein in this apparatus perpetuates an unjust system that harms all communities. We urge you and the rest of Congress to support privacy protections that ensure fairness, accountability, and justice for all of us.
To read the full letter and signatories, please download the organizational letter below.
Calls to Action
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Use our call script to call their offices below:
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries: (718) 237–2211
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: (212) 486-4430
Hi, I’m calling today to demand that your office protect constituents and protestors from mass surveillance by shutting the backdoor search and data broker loopholes before considering any reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA. As a concerned American about free speech and protests, I strongly reject any use of anti-immigrant, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism by congressional members to justify keeping the backdoor-search loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). We urge your office to prioritize the protection of our constituents by: ending mass surveillance of people in the U.S., closing the backdoor search and data broker loopholes before any reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA is considered. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I believe that by taking a stand against mass surveillance and discrimination, we can create a safer and more just society for all.