ACLU - The FBI, is secretly and deliberately collecting information about innocent Americans for its intelligence files, and illegally recording information about their speech, beliefs, and First Amendment-protected activities. The FBI is doing this intelligence collection through community outreach programs — programs that are supposed to build trust and rapport with the public — without telling community groups or their members what it is doing.
The proof is in the FBI’s own documents. The ACLU has issued an alert that highlights FBI documents from San Francisco and Sacramento showing that the FBI is systematically storing in intelligence files memos containing the names, identifying information, and opinions of people who attend FBI outreach programs; the expressive activities of community groups; the names and positions of group leaders; and the racial, ethnic, and national origin of group members. A few examples:
After a 2008 meeting with a Pakistani community group, an FBI agent recorded the group leaders’ names and identified them with the First Amendment-protected activities of the group — and sent this information to an intelligence file.
After attending a Ramadan Iftar dinner in 2008, an FBI agent collected and documented individuals’ contact information and their First Amendment-protected opinions and associations, and “disseminated” this information “outside the FBI,” presumably to other law enforcement or intelligence agencies.
The FBI records described above and others violate the Privacy Act, which prohibits the government from compiling records about individuals’ First Amendment-protected activities in federal databases, absent special circumstances that don’t exist here.
The Privacy Act was passed in1974 in response to revelations that the FBI was engaged in pervasive and abusive data collection about people involved in peaceful civil rights and anti-war groups simply because of what they thought and believed, or the people with whom they associated. T
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