Banks use the watch list of suspected terrorists maintained by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to assist in identifying potential financial transaction violations, such as when a Muslim charity wants to use its services for overseas transfers to send humanitarian aid. Now the wide spread use of the OFAC list is being exposed. For example many Americans are being denied jobs and various services because their names are similar to others who are designated. A report by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area details these ordinary citizens who have had difficulties in obtaining a loan, purchasing a car, and even purchasing exercise equipment. Unfortunately, if someone is mistaken for someone on the list, there is no way for Treasury to actually address complaints of OFAC screening. Many have been turned away from businesses instead of having the chance to provide more identification documents to prove the mistake. The report, "The OFAC List: How a Treasury Department Terrorist Watchlist Ensnares Everyday Consumers," results in the unnerving realization that anyone can be affected. A Washington Post article, "Ordinary Customers Flagged as Terrorists," covered this story as well.

The New York Times reported that the New York City Police Department's Intelligence Division sent undercover detectives around the city and country collecting information on activists planning on demonstrating at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Surveillance was not only conducted on groups that planned on disrupting the convention, but rather broadly on political activists throughout the country. Yet, the lawyers for the city say these documents should remain secret, in light of the civil lawsuits pending from the more than 1,000 arrests made during the convention.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped "N.Y.P.D. Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show. These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

Read a blog post from Daily Kos here

This article titled "Dissent is not Terrorism" from TomPaine chronicles the government spying on the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a pacifist Quaker organization. The article describes the government's documentation of peaceful protests planned by AFSC as terrorist in nature, revealed in documents released through a FOIA request. OMB Watch has followed this trend of the government spying on peaceful nonprofit organizations throughout the country.

News of this has been around for a while, but as the Democratic-led Congress focuses its attention on open government, the experiences of the Service Committee highlight the excesses of an unaccountable government and the importance of tools like the Freedom of Information Act to preserve that accountability. . . . We expect our elected officials to uphold the rule of law, and we ask Congress to assert its role to create checks and balances on other branches of the government in order to protect our civil liberties.

Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post:

The Justice Department is opposing bipartisan Senate legislation that would require federal agencies to disclose to Congress data-mining programs they use to find patterns of criminal or terrorist activity, saying that it duplicates a reporting requirement mandated in the 2006 renewal of the USA Patriot Act.

While the outcome of S.4, the Senate bill to implement 9/11 recommendations, continues to be murky, one important amendment was defeated today in a vote of 49-46. This package of amendments offered by Senator Cornyn (R-TX) S.AMDT.312 included a measure that would have further expanded the definition of material support. Written so broadly, it could have made it a crime for individuals, including Americans and US aid and relief organizations to give charitable assistance to a family member or anyone who might live next door to a suspected terrorist. We were clearly concerned, as it could increase the barriers nonprofits face to provide humanitarian aid. And in a related piece, read this New York Times editorial on how a flawed definition of aiding terrorism is keeping victims out of the country. The editorial is calling on Congress to fix the definition of who is a terrorist and what constitutes providing support to terrorism.

What is shocking, and scandalous, is that American law currently bars the entry to the United States of some of terrorism's most abused victims: refugees who have been forced, often at gunpoint, to provide so-called material assistance.

Earlier this week in the case involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, declassified documents were found to be fabricated, and in response lawyers requested the declassification of thousands of other pages of FBI evidence. The LA Times reports that U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish denied this request, but the fact that the document wrongly accused charity officials of anti-Semitic slurs was disconcerting. Defense lawyers were told to return to court if they find other government summaries that are inaccurate.

The judge said he found it disturbing that the government's summary included inflammatory language not found in the transcripts. . . . In their motion, defense lawyers said they had recently received declassified summaries representing about 10% of the conversations recorded by the government in court-authorized surveillance. They worried that additional discrepancies could exist in the documents.