CAIRO, December 24, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) - The US National Security Agency (NSA) has “directly” tapped the country’s main communications systems without court-approved warrants, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has monitored mosques and private homes of Muslims to monitor “radiation levels,” news reports have revealed.

Citing current and former government officials, the New York Times said the volume of information gathered from telephone and Internet communications by the NSA was much larger than President George W. Bush has acknowledged.

They said the NSA sought to analyze communications patterns to gather clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, as well as the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages.

Some officials described the program as a large data mining operation, the Times said.

Bush has defended an executive order he signed in 2002 allowing eavesdropping without warrants, saying it was limited only to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to Al-Qaeda.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires court approval of wiretaps and electronic surveillance.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday, December 23, on the Times report.

“The message they are sending through these kinds of actions is that being Muslim is sufficient evidence to warrant scrutiny,” said Hooper.

The paper said that the country’s giant communications companies have helped the NSA obtain a “backdoor access” to streams of domestic and international communications.

Several officials said senior government officials went to the nation's big telecommunications companies to get access to switches that act as gateways between US and international communications.

Calls to and from Afghanistan were of particular interest to the NSA, the Times said.

A former telecommunications technology manager told the paper that communications industry leaders have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists since the Sept. 11 attacks.

“All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area,” said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used.

Prior to 9/11, the NSA typically limited its domestic surveillance activities to foreign embassies and missions under court orders.

Americans have been wary of domestic monitoring by intelligence agencies since it was learned in the 1970s that the Pentagon spied on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War groups. That led to the 1978 legislation.

The spying has further extended to mosques and private homes of Muslims to monitor radiation levels, US News and World Report revealed on Friday.

According to the report, the nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team.

At its peak, the effort involved three vehicles in the Washington area monitoring 120 sites a day, nearly all of them Muslim targets such as prominent mosques and office buildings selected by the FBI, it said.

The program has also operated in at least six cities -- namely Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle, according to the report.

One source quoted by the magazine said the targets were almost all US citizens.

Vice President Dick Cheney was among those briefed on the monitoring program, the publication said.

An FBI spokesman declined to confirm or deny the US News and World Report article and said, "We can't talk about a classified program."

"The FBI's overriding priority is to prevent, disrupt and defeat terrorist operations in the US. All investigations and operations conducted by the FBI are intelligence driven and predicated on specific information about potential criminal acts or terrorist threats, and are conducted in strict conformance with federal law," he told Reuters.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed on Tuesday, December 20, that the FBI was using counterterrorism resources to monitor and infiltrate American political organizations that criticize business interests and government policies.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) advocacy group said the report, coupled with news of the domestic eavesdropping, "could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights."

“The message they are sending through these kinds of actions is that being Muslim is sufficient evidence to warrant scrutiny,” CAIR’s spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told the Washington Post.

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, director of outreach for Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, called the surveillance another example of unwarranted activity -- "both unwarranted from the standpoint of spying on Muslims who are only trying to observe their rituals and unwarranted in terms of not having proper judicial review."

"I don't understand what good this sort of surveillance is doing," added Mukit Hossain, trustee of the All Dulles Area Muslims Society in Sterling.

"What we are doing is harassing the immigrants and citizens and we haven't found one that is a terrorist," he told the Post.

He said this kind of surveillance fuels "anti-Muslim feelings in America and a public relations problem for America in Muslim countries."

CAIR announced Thursday, December 23, the filing of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all government records relating to Bush's eavesdropping executive order.

CAIR filed the FOIA request with the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, including the FBI.

In the request, CAIR asked for: "Records concerning the 'authority' of President Bush to delegate or personally authorize electronic surveillance without obtaining a court order and all lists of natural persons, both American and foreign nationals, who have been or are currently being eavesdropped."