State surveillance of Muslims in the War on Terror involves the unjustified monitoring of the bodies of Americans who are by and large law-abiding citizens. Immediately after 9/11, the FBI detained and interrogated thousands of Muslims living in the United States (Hing 2006; Cainkar 2009). In the years since, state surveillance of Muslim noncitizens and Muslim Americans has for the most part been conducted under a cloud of secrecy. However, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked tens of thousands of classified National Security Administration (NSA) documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill, revealing the far-reaching nature of state surveillance. These documents uncovered a mass surveillance operation initiated by the United States. According to the documents, prominent Muslim American leaders such as Nihad Awad, the executive director for the Council on American Islamic Relations, were under surveillance by the U.S. government and had their emails monitored by the FBI. Faisal Gill, a Republican party operative, was also one of the names on the list. Even though President George W. Bush had appointed Gill as a policy director for the Department of Homeland Security, he was not immune from surveillance by the government. None of these Muslim American leaders have a criminal record nor has their surveillance resulted in their arrest, but their Muslim identity was enough to raise suspicion and justify their surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racial/religious profiling and the surveillance state post-9/11, and to Snowden revelations.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 51