Civil rights activists on Wednesday said they have sued the FBI for allegedly violating the First Amendment by spying on Orange County Muslims inside mosques. The case focuses on the activities of a paid informant. 26-year-old Ali Malek is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. He recalled his first encounter with Craig Monteilh.
"I first met Monteilh when he testified to his faith in front of roughly 1,000 people at the mosque in Irvine," Malek said. "It was a ceremony in which you become a Muslim."
Malek said his imam asked him to teach Monteilh about Islam, but he said Monteilh had other interests.
"Constantly he would ask me about jihad and what I thought about it," Malek said. "My reaction initially was, he is a new Muslim, he just became Muslim, perhaps has some misconstrued ideas and perceptions of the religion and I was more than happy to clarify those misconceptions."
Monteilh continued his questions about jihad and started showing up at Malek's gym.
"I thought he was weird and so I just wanted to keep my distance," Malek said. "And I wanted to give it some time to see how the situation developed. And then when the case came out, all the pieces of the puzzle came together."
It turned out that Monteilh was working for the FBI. He had spied on Orange County mosques for the FBI over a year from 2006 to 2007, recording conversations with a device on his key ring and a camera hidden within a shirt button.
"I can not conceive of any, any legitimate purpose the government would have to send an informant into our mosques, to gather indiscriminately information, destroying the sanctity of our sacred space," said CAIR spokesman Ameena Mirza Qazi.
In their class action lawsuit, CAIR and the ACLU accuse the FBI of targeting Muslims based on their religion.
Peter Bibring, of the ACLU, said the FBI is retreating from restrictions Congress placed on it in the 1970s.
"Over the past 10 years, we've seen the FBI steadily rolling back those protections, increasing their ability to initiate investigations without any indication of criminal activity," Bibring said. He claims that Muslims are a favorite post-Sept. 11 target.
Imam Yassir Fazaga is with a therapist associated with the Orange County Islamic Foundation. He has seen his clients become increasingly paranoid about personal conversations with him at a mosque.
"I can no longer discuss this with them at the mosque," Fazaga said. "From now on I have to meet my clients in the park. I have to meet with them somewhere else where they would feel more comfortable than at the mosque."
Malik, now an administrator for a San Francisco non-profit organization, said he has become more suspicious as well.
"I feel that at times I am being followed. I definitely feel that all my phone calls are tapped. I feel that my emails are filtered and tapped. I feel like I can't have a loving conversation with my wife.
"My wife and I both feel that way. We feel like we can't even keep the phone in the room on and have a loving conversation without assuming the FBI is monitoring that conversation. I feel like there's probably FBI in this room right now.", he said.
The class-action suit seeks to prevent the FBI from indiscriminately targeting Muslims and to make the agency to destroy all evidence collected that way. The three plaintiffs named seek damages for emotional duress as well.