The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy group, sent letters to three U.S. House committee chairs asking them to investigate the U.S. military’s purchase of location and movement data of users of Muslim-oriented apps. CAIR called for legislation prohibiting government agencies from purchasing user data that would otherwise require a warrant.
Muslim community leaders point to the expansion of the U.S. drone program under President Obama, which used drones for surveillance and targeted killings in Muslim-majority countries like Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq and resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths.
That’s why it’s so troubling that data showing how often Muslims engage with their faith and where they are could end up in the hands of the U.S. military, said Zahra Billoo, a civil rights attorney and executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter.
“This feels like a betrayal from within our own community,” said Billoo. “People feel that they should have been able to trust a company that markets and serves specifically the Muslim community — a community that has been under incredible attack domestically and abroad — to keep that data private, to be incredibly diligent about who they were selling it to, if they would sell it at all.”