By Khalida Sarwari
The Council on American-Islamic Relations today filed a lawsuit against the FBI that claims the agency planted a GPS surveillance device on a San Jose college student’s car without a warrant and violated his constitutional rights.
The suit was filed this morning in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old Egyptian-American student at Mission College in Santa Clara, his attorney Zahra Billoo, who is also the executive director of CAIR, said.
“The concern is that his civil rights were violated,” Billoo said. “There’s nothing preventing them from putting another tracking device on his car.”
She said FBI agents contacted Afifi a second time at the end of January.
The first time they contacted him was on Oct. 5, 2010, when about a half dozen FBI agents who were following Afifi stopped him and demanded that he return a device they said belonged to the agency. Billoo said they interrogated and threatened him, so he cooperated and gave it back.
Two days prior, Afifi had taken his car to the shop to get an oil change and a mechanic discovered a suspicious device on his car, Billoo said. He took the device home and posted photos of it online, asking people if they knew what it was. Someone told him it was GPS tracking device.
Billoo said the device had been placed on his car without a warrant to monitor his activities and therefore violated Afifi’s First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights as well as his privacy act.
In response to the lawsuit, Michael Kortan, an assistant director for the FBI in Washington, D.C., said, “The FBI conducts investigations under well-established Department of Justice and FBI guidelines that determine what investigative steps or techniques are appropriate.”
According to the lawsuit, “In addition to the fear Mr. Afifi now feels when expressing his political views and maintaining certain lawful associations, defendants’ actions have deterred others from associating with him, prospective employers most notably.”
Billoo said the lawsuit seeks an order preventing another tracking device being attached to Afifi’s vehicle without a search warrant. The suit also seeks an injunction barring the FBI from using tracking devices without first obtaining search warrants.
The lawsuit further seeks an order to destroy or return any records that were obtained illegally by the FBI, Billoo said.
She said the suit was filed in Washington, D.C., because it is where the FBI has its headquarters and that the federal court there requires a warrant for GPS tracking devices, as opposed to the Ninth Circuit, which last year decided that a warrant was not necessary for that type of surveillance.
The suit names Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller and the involved FBI agents as defendants.