SALT LAKE CITY — The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah worries that a new FBI program may lead to racial profiling — so the group is seeking documents that would show what racial data the FBI is now collecting and how it is used.
The Utah chapter joined ACLU branches nationwide Tuesday to file coordinated Freedom of Information Act requests with their local FBI field offices about a recently disclosed program to collect and map racial and ethnic data.
"The FBI's mapping of local communities and businesses based on race and ethnicity, as well as its ability to target communities for investigation based on supposed racial and ethnic behaviors, raises serious civil liberties concerns," said Michael German, ACLU policy counsel and a former FBI agent.
"Creating a profile of a neighborhood for criminal law enforcement or domestic intelligence purposes based on the ethnic makeup of people who live there or the types of businesses they run is unfair, un-American and will certainly not help stop crime," he said.
The FBI's authority to collect such data is described in its 2008 Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide. The ACLU said not much was known about it until a lawsuit filed by Muslim Advocates led to release of that guide's description of the data collection authorization. The ACLU said little is still known about how the FBI has actually implemented that authority.
Darcy Goddard, legal director of the ACLU of Utah, said, "The public deserves to know how the FBI is implementing a race-based domestic intelligence program with such troubling implications for civil rights and civil liberties."
She added, "We should all be concerned with the federal government collecting race-based data to track, or map, supposed 'behaviors' or 'characteristics' of certain members of our community — especially when we do not know exactly what types of information are being collected and how the data is being protected from misuse."
The FBI office in Salt Lake declined to comment. Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the FBI in Washington, told KSL, "I reject the idea we use the information for profiling. … (It is used as) a law enforcement tool to help solve cases, to identify trends and establish leads to help solve a case, whether it be a homicide or mortgage fraud or whatever the issue."
The bureau says its procedures don't zero in on anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or the exercise of any other constitutional right.
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