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Arab American sues FBI over GPS
A 20-year-old Arab American from San Jose sued the FBI on Wednesday for secretly attaching a tracking device to his car and threatening him with federal charges when he refused to give it back.
Yasir Afifi is not politically active, has no connection to terrorist groups and has no idea why the FBI put him under surveillance, said attorney Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which filed the lawsuit. She said the FBI has disclosed some of the contents of its file on Afifi but has not said why he is being monitored.
The suit seeks damages, an end to the surveillance and an order forbidding the FBI to place a global positioning service, or GPS, tracking device on a vehicle without a search warrant.
Afifi, a college student in Santa Clara who also works as a salesman, said he took his car to a garage for an oil change on Oct. 3 and saw the device attached by magnets between the right rear wheel and the exhaust. He said he was afraid it was a pipe bomb, but learned it was a GPS tracker after posting pictures on the Internet.