Man Sues Feds After They Target Him for Photographing Rainbow Art

When 86-year-old photographer James Prigoff paused to photograph a natural gas storage tank in Boston 10 years ago, he was simply doing what countless of tourists have done before. The colorful tank, painted with a rainbow-like design, is a popular photo op. He had no reason to suspect his snapshot would prompt an ominous visit by a federal agent months later and the addition of his name to a government database of suspicious activity.

Man Sues Feds After They Target Him for Photographing Rainbow Art Rainbow-art-inline11

Man Sues Feds After They Target Him for Photographing Rainbow Art Rainbow-art-inline11

But his case is hardly unique. Similar circumstances have befallen four other people, who are suing the government over so-called suspicious activity reports, or SARs, filed against them.

The plaintiffs—two photographers, a white male convert to Islam, and two men of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent—were all engaged in seemingly innocuous activity. Two of them were photographing sites of aesthetic interest, one was apparently viewing a website about videogames at home, another attempted to buy multiple computers at Best Buy, and the last one caught attention of authorities for standing outside a train station restroom waiting for his mother.

But due to the standards the government uses for determining suspicious activity that might be related to terrorism, all of the plaintiffs found themselves written up in reports stored in counterterrorism databases and were subjected to unwelcome and unwarranted law enforcement scrutiny and interrogation, according to the lawsuit. The suit was filed Thursday in the District Court for the Northern District of California by the American Civil Liberties of Northern California, the national ACLU, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus.

“This domestic surveillance program wrongly targets First Amendment-protected activities, encourages racial and religious profiling, and violates federal law,” said Linda Lye, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. “The Justice Department’s own rules say that there should be reasonable suspicion before creating a record on someone, but the government’s instructions to local police are that they should write up SARs even if there’s no valid reason to suspect a person of doing anything wrong.”

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/five-sue-gov-over-targeting/

Man Sues Feds After They Target Him for Photographing Rainbow Art

Man Sues Feds After They Target Him for Photographing Rainbow Art

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