Watch those chat rooms....

Today's New York Times has a several page article about a 16 year old muslim girl who was suspected of terrorism. While I think situations like this are questionable as far as really stopping terrorism, the bottom line is it was her parents immigration status and her participating in a chat room that brought the attention on her and ultimately ended in her leaving the US.

Some selected parts of the article:

The story of how it happened - how Tashnuba, the pious, headstrong daughter of Muslim immigrants living in a neighborhood of tidy lawns and American flags, was labeled an imminent threat to national security - is still shrouded in government secrecy. After nearly seven weeks in detention, she was released in May on the condition that she leave the country immediately. Only immigration charges were brought against her and another 16-year-old New York girl, who was detained and released. Federal officials will not discuss the matter.

But as the first terror investigation in the United States known to involve minors, the case reveals how deeply concerned the government is that a teenager might become a terrorist, and the lengths to which federal agents will go if they get even a whiff of that possibility. And it has drawn widespread attention, stoking the debate over the right balance between government vigilance and the protection of individual freedoms.

Two former F.B.I. agents, presented with the known details of the case, declined to discuss it specifically, but spoke of the pressures and practices that shape such investigations today.

Pasquale J. D'Amuro, who headed the New York F.B.I. office until April, said that since 9/11, agents have had to err on the side of suspicion. More potential threats are being reported, he said, and every one must be thoroughly investigated through whatever avenues are legally available, including enlisting immigration authorities as soon as a noncitizen is under scrutiny.
But Mike German, who left the bureau a year ago after a long career chasing homegrown terror suspects, said that the agency's new emphasis on collecting intelligence rather than criminal evidence has opened the door to more investigations that go "in the wrong direction."
"If all these chat rooms are being monitored, and we're running down all these people because of what they're saying in chat rooms, then these are resources we're not using on real threats," said Mr. German, who has publicly complained that F.B.I. management problems impeded terror investigations after 9/11.

From the beginning, the government framed this case as purely an immigration matter. When a dozen federal agents plucked the girl from her home in a dawn raid on March 24, they cited only the expiration of her mother's immigration papers, telling the family that Tashnuba would probably be returned the next day.

Instead, after two weeks of frantic inquiries by her parents, The New York Times learned that Tashnuba was one of two girls being held, officially on their parents' immigration violations, but actually for questioning by F.B.I.'s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

From childhood, Tashnuba embraced religion with a kind of rebellion. By 10 she was praying five times a day - and reproaching her more secular father, a salesman of cheap watches. At 12, Tashnuba even explored Christianity. But at 14, she adopted a full Islamic veil.

In part, she was emulating her closest friend, Shahela, an American citizen who, in an interview, described veiling as a way to oppose "the degrading treatment of women's bodies as commodities" and "to hold on to my faith after 9/11." It also provided Tashnuba a refuge from her parents' marital rifts and fragile reconciliations. Soon, the two friends were conducting religious classes for other girls at city mosques.

....the government had apparently discovered her visits to an Internet chat room where she took notes on sermons by a charismatic Islamic cleric in London, a sheik who has long been accused of encouraging suicide bombings.

But on March 4, when she knocked at the Hayder family's door, Ms. Younis and her partner did not reveal that they were F.B.I. agents, said Tashnuba's mother, Ishrat Jahan Hayder. They claimed to be from a youth center, following up on the police report filed five months earlier when the girl tried to elope. Mrs. Hayder readily sent the woman upstairs to her daughter's bedroom. "I trusted her," she said.

From the moment she walked in, as Tashnuba tells it, Ms. Younis started paging through her papers. "She was like, 'Can I look at this?' Not waiting for an answer."

Three weeks later - two days after Ms. Younis wrote a secret declaration about Tashnuba, court documents show - immigration agents raided the house. As an immigration matter, that was highly unusual; there was no active proceeding against her mother or father, whose separate, long-pending applications for political asylum had lapsed without action in the late 1990's.

But Tashnuba said the agents told her, "Your mom just admitted you're not here legally and we have to take you, or else take everybody." At immigration headquarters in Manhattan, the F.B.I. was waiting, along with the other girl, Adama Bah, a native of Guinea whom Tashnuba said she knew slightly from a Manhattan mosque. Ms. Bah was of less interest to the authorities than Tashnuba, according to the government official who reviewed F.B.I. reports.

At day's end, the girls were driven to a maximum-security juvenile detention center in rural Berks County, Pa. Suddenly they were among delinquent girls accused of drug crimes and assaults. Tashnuba was required to wear a sweat suit, march at attention and submit to strip-searches, she said. And the questioning began in earnest.

A government psychiatrist concluded that she was neither suicidal nor homicidal, and recommended her release. But the agents, Tashnuba said, kept "trying to link me to the psychological state." They zeroed in on the single artificial rose in her bedroom (her little sister's); a psychology course (required by her correspondence program), and an essay she wrote about the Department of Homeland Security (assigned as a writing evaluation by her tutor).

The tutor, Asmaa Samad, recalled the essay as innocuous: "It said nothing derogative, nothing unpatriotic." Tashnuba said agents seized on one part. "I wrote, 'I feel like Muslims are being targeted, they're being outcasted more.'"

But instead of backing away from opinions that the agents seemed to find alarming, Tashnuba said she dug in her heels, especially on her belief in jihad. "If Islam is threatened, you have a right to fight back," Tashnuba declared, citing Koran verses.

The other girl was allowed to return to her East Harlem high school in early May, under strict conditions including an order not to discuss the case. But for Tashnuba, there was no prospect of release, her lawyer, Troy Mattes, said he was told.

Broke and distraught, Tashnuba's mother asked to take "voluntary departure" with her daughter, rather than fight. The government agreed, and an immigration judge issued the necessary order.

Of course the ultimate responsibility lies with her parents for not making sure they remained here in the US legally. Had they been here legally the charges may have well ended up being dropped for lack of evidence rather than ending up with deportation. This should also serve I guess as a reminder for those who visit chat rooms and message boards that they are watching us. Of course if they watch me they'll be hopefully at least entertained....