# FBI ## The Pariah https://theintercept.com/2021/11/30/fbi-informant-watchlist-reputation-damage/ By [[The Intercept]] "He Declined the FBI's Offer to Become an Informant. Then His Life Was Ruined." "After that fateful FBI visit, many of Khan’s contacts who traveled to the U.S. started to be repeatedly detained at the U.S. border, sometimes for hours. Those stopped included friends and acquaintances in Pakistan, as well as people with whom he was only casually connected on social media." "A consistent feature of the stops, something that at least five of Khan’s contacts confirmed, is that they were asked about their relationship with him at the border. The contacts said U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers suggested to them during interrogations that Khan was a dangerous person, a possible terrorist. The officials made it clear that he was the source of their problems at the border." “There are a number of people who have accused the FBI of putting them on the no-fly list for refusing to be an informant,” said [[Michael German]], a former FBI agent who is now a fellow in the [[Brennan Center for Justice]]’s liberty and national security program. “Agents need to have informants, which is why they go on these fishing expeditions. When people refuse, they often become vindictive. They take the attitude that, ‘We gave you a chance to prove yourself on our side and your refusal to aid us means you’re against us.’” ^0824a5 - Interesting background... what's with the switch One FBI presentation said, as officials also told Khan, that the authorities aren’t looking for “bad guys” to push to become informants, but rather for “good guys.” Individual agents were given broad discretionary power in how they handled such situations. The result, FBI whistleblower Terry Albury [recently told](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/magazine/fbi-terrorism-terry-albury.html) the New York Times, was a culture of racism and malice, with agents pressuring individuals into spying on their communities and frequently destroying the lives of innocent people in the process. - See [[#'I Helped Destroy People']] “It is very typical to hear about someone pressured to become an informant who refuses and suffers retaliation in the form of being placed on the no-fly list,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “What is worse in this case is that as a noncitizen all of these problems are exacerbated: The already constitutionally inadequate recourse available to citizens and permanent residents placed on the list is not even available to him.” “I’ve lived a clean life and never got into any kind of trouble at all anywhere in the world. This really affected me. I love America, and I loved every part of my life there. Even today I wish I could go watch the Celtics at TD Garden, see my old college, and go visit my friends and family,” he said. “No one has ever even accused me of doing anything, so I can’t see where the justice is in any of this. It feels like one guy in the FBI just decided that he was going to ruin my life for no reason.” “I’ve lived a clean life and never got into any kind of trouble at all anywhere in the world. This really affected me. I love America, and I loved every part of my life there. Even today I wish I could go watch the Celtics at TD Garden, see my old college, and go visit my friends and family,” he said. “No one has ever even accused me of doing anything, so I can’t see where the justice is in any of this. It feels like one guy in the FBI just decided that he was going to ruin my life for no reason.” ![[Pasted image 20211130193232.png]] As the banging on the front door continued, Khan’s cellphone rang with the number of his cousin displayed on the caller ID. Thinking that it was her at the door and that perhaps she had forgotten something on the way to work, he picked up the phone. “Hey, should I come open the door?” “This is not your cousin,” a man’s voice curtly replied. “This is the FBI. Come to the door now and do not hang up the phone.” “They put me in the front seat. First thing they said to me was that I’m a really tall guy and that they didn’t think I’d be this tall,” Khan said. “They said that people had been watching me for the past week and that cars had been tailgating me and asked if I’d noticed. I told them I hadn’t.” Khan had come from a relatively well-off family in Pakistan who had paid for him to be educated in the United States. He told the officers that he did not need a job. He wouldn’t be well-suited for it anyways, he added, describing himself as loud, sociable, and not the type of person who could keep dark secrets to himself. The officers said the FBI could provide him with U.S. citizenship, money, and other perks; they promised that whoever worked for them would become a powerful person with connections that would make them “untouchable.” (The FBI declined to comment for this story or to make Klopfer available to answer questions. Neither Burke nor the Connecticut State Police responded to a request for comment.) Although he wanted U.S. citizenship — offering him the chance to spend more time in a country he loved, with family and friends — the idea of becoming an informant was out of the question. Even though he did not attend mosque regularly, he did not want to be sent by the FBI to spy on people at prayers. The officers continued to make offers, and Khan kept rebuffing them. “I told them, ‘I respect you and what you do. You put your lives at risk to protect us and the people of the United States, but I’m not one of those people who is cut out to be a spy or is interested in the kinds of things you’re offering me,’” Khan recalled. “I said, ‘I have a clean record and lived here for years without ever doing anything wrong.’ They told me, ‘That’s why we want you.’ They said, ‘We don’t go after troublemakers, we want the good guys to work for us.’” After about two hours of tense conversation, the officers put Khan back in the car and drove him home. Wracked with anxiety, he had been unable to take a single bite of his food. Now he was just glad that this frightening ordeal was about to be over. Before leaving, Khan said, Klopfer gave strict instructions not to tell anyone about the meeting: not his family and especially not a lawyer. They said they would be in touch again soon. AS SOON AS the officers drove away, Khan immediately dialed his aunt to tell her what had happened: that the FBI had picked him up at home, that they were offering him money and perks to work for them as an informant, and that he was scared. She and his cousin rushed home from work and called a lawyer in Bridgeport to set up an appointment for later that day. When they arrived, the lawyer, Christian Young, took the numbers of the FBI and Connecticut state police officers who had picked Khan up. Young called the officials and told them not to contact Khan again without calling him first. - That's probably what did it - he was specifically instructed not to tell a lawyer about it A week later, according to Khan, Klopfer called Young and said that he wanted to interview Khan again before a federal prosecutor. Young advised Khan to take the meeting and said that he would be there with him to make sure it went smoothly, Khan said. (Young declined to comment for this story.) The interview was scheduled for just over a week later. Wanting to make a confident impression, unlike the last meeting in which the officers had showed up at his house in the early morning unannounced, Khan came wearing a suit and tie. “By this time, I already knew that Andrew Klopfer was pissed off at me,” Khan said, noting that the FBI agent was much more standoffish than their first meeting. “I did exactly what he didn’t want me to do by telling my aunt and getting a lawyer. I was no good to them anymore for what they had wanted me to do.” A description of this meeting, which also referenced Khan’s previous meeting with the FBI at the diner, was obtained years later as part of a [[Freedom of Information Act]] request submitted by Ahmad, the attorney with CLEAR. The document describes Khan’s views as expressed at the meeting about a variety of issues, including details of his life as a student in the United States, relationships with family members, future career plans, as well as his political views. A month later, at the boarding area of John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, Khan got an SSSS — short for “secondary security screening selection” — flag on his boarding pass for the first time in his life. He received a bit of extra scrutiny at the security checkpoint, but otherwise things seemed normal. He boarded his flight back to Pakistan with his mind clear, already making plans in his head for his next visit. #### (about Khan's friend Munshi) “Driving to Buffalo and being detained there was the worst experience of my life,” Munshi said. “I could not believe how I was treated, with the assumption that I was a criminal. They kept me for six hours, shuffling me around into different rooms, one of them where they left me to freeze for an extended time, and separated from my parents. I met one immigration officer after another, and whenever I asked what the problem was, they’d just tell me it was above their pay grade.” After several hours, Munshi was informed by border agents that he had been denied entry again. The officials provided no reason and made no specific allegations against him over six hours of questioning. The only clue he had to why he had suddenly become unwelcome in the U.S., a country that he been traveling to his whole life, was the question he had received during that first interview: the airline ticket he had bought for his friend Aswad Khan. ### Rumors spread CBP agents questioned Y. for several hours along with his wife. Officials asked about his friendship with Khan, how Khan earned a living, and what he used his income for. “I told the agents that they’re making a mistake with these questions about Aswad and that they had the wrong guy,” Y. said. “They told me that they’re going to ask whatever questions they wanted. Then they said point blank in front of my wife that if they’re asking these types of questions about Aswad, that means he’s a person I shouldn’t be associating myself with.” Like several others who spoke to The Intercept, Y., who travels frequently to the U.S. for work, deleted Khan’s contact off his phone and his social media accounts. He called Khan to apologize at the time, saying that he was shaken by the harassment he had begun facing. The experience put a strain on their friendship, though, unlike many others, Y. had at least talked to Khan about it. In his community in Karachi, rumors were spreading well beyond his close friends that being in any way connected with Khan was a certain route to getting in trouble at the U.S. border. “People gossip and eventually it came to a point where a lot of people would not even want to meet Aswad,” said Munshi. “They started thinking that maybe he really did do something wrong, and that’s why he had these problems with the U.S. government. They started thinking that maybe it was because of him that his friends and other people he knew were starting to have the same problems too. People started deleting him off Facebook. They were afraid to even be associated with him.” #### Cannot confirm whether you are on the no-fly list In 2018, Khan, still struggling to figure out how to clear his name, filed paperwork with the Department of Homeland Security’s redress program. Like Munshi, his friend, the written response from the agency he received in July of that year was vague, stating that the agency “can neither confirm nor deny any information about you which may be within federal watchlists.” He had run up against one of the limits governing noncitizens and nonresidents who seek information about their watchlisting: The government does not even have to confirm whether he is on the no-fly list, let alone what is justifying keeping him there. The issue of reputational harm has come up in previous lawsuits that targeted the watchlisting system, though the courts have so far upheld the practice as constitutional. An [article](https://www.lawfareblog.com/case-summary-fourth-circuit-upholds-terrorism-watchlist-database) this June in the national security law publication Lawfare about one such case put it, “[W]hile the Supreme Court has recognized a liberty interest in a person’s reputation, reputational injuries must involve a combination of factors: a statement that stigmatizes the plaintiff in the community and has been publicly disseminated, and the government must take some additional action that has altered or extinguished the plaintiff’s legal rights.” The secrecy of the watchlists means that the reputationally damaging information about would-be claimants — the very fact that they are on a list — has been ruled by courts to not count as having been publicly disseminated. And yet the reputational damage is real. It is the ruin of his name and his friendships that continues to torment Khan. The government’s terrorist watchlisting system remains opaque. The most consequential revelation to date was a 2014 leak, [published by The Intercept](https://theintercept.com/2014/07/23/blacklisted/), about its size and characteristics. Disclosures in a lawsuit from 2017 established that the watchlist had grown to [1.2 million people](https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1689-terror-watchlist-ruling/75cd50557652ad0bfa2a/optimized/full.pdf#page=1), the vast majority of whom were neither U.S. citizens nor permanent residents. Being placed on the watchlist can have any number of effects on a person, such as preventing them from traveling to suffering [abuse and detention in foreign countries](https://theintercept.com/2021/05/30/no-fly-list-terrorism-watchlist/). Khan believes his placement on the list caused him to be personally ruined by suspicions of association with terrorism. ^ba78bf “It’s easy enough to put someone on a watchlist and forget about it. The fact that it has continuing impact on a person’s life is meaningless to them.” “People get put on these lists and just get left there. There is no pressure to take them off; in fact there is pressure to not take them off in case one day in the future they possibly do something,” said German, the former FBI agent. “It’s easy enough to put someone on a watchlist and forget about it. The fact that it has continuing impact on a person’s life is meaningless to them.” Khan is still in Pakistan. His past life of frequent visits to the U.S. and elsewhere are now a distant memory. Though he used to enjoy traveling, he has only left Pakistan once since his encounter with the FBI. He has not attempted to return to the U.S. since his last trip, for fear of what might happen when confronted by U.S. authorities. The experience of boarding an international flight and confronting the possibility of a border crossing anywhere in the world fills him with anxiety. Unaware what type of rumors have been spread about him by the U.S. government with foreign authorities, let alone people in his own life, he has become wracked by depression and paranoia. Nearly a decade after his fateful morning visit from the FBI, his life has not returned to normal. A year after Ahmed’s wedding ceremony in Italy, which he did not attend, Khan ran into his childhood best friend at a party in Karachi. The two had not spoken or seen each other for nearly two years. In the meantime, Khan had heard from others that Ahmed had told some friends that he had felt pressured to sever their friendship because “the U.S. government is after him,” and that his absence at his wedding was to protect the other guests from the possible consequences of being associated with him. When the two saw each other at that party, Ahmed took him aside to talk. After a few moments, Ahmed broke down and cried. “He said he didn’t want any bad feelings with me, and that when I had gotten into trouble, he just got scared. It was a hard conversation for us to have,” Khan said. “I had never felt hurt in my life like I had when he cut me off without saying a word. But I told him it was OK. It is what it is.” “‘You believed what they said about me, and you got scared. I get it. You thought I was a terrorist.’” ## 'I Helped Destroy People' https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/magazine/fbi-terrorism-terry-albury.html https://archive.md/rwcM2 ##### [[Terry Albury]], an idealistic F.B.I. agent, grew so disillusioned by the war on terror that he was willing to leak classified documents — and go to prison for doing it. ## THE FBI’S SECRET METHODS FOR RECRUITING INFORMANTS AT THE BORDER https://theintercept.com/2016/10/05/fbi-secret-methods-for-recruiting-informants-at-the-border/ By [[The Intercept]]