spying muslims
© AFP Photo / Getty Images / Mario Tama
Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists with access to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, will soon expose massive NSA spying on American Muslims, the ACLU has announced.

The leaked data indicate that in public life American Muslims were "subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Wednesday.

He didn't provide further details, or any deadline for the expected exposรฉ to be published, explaining that preparing it is labor-intensive because the source material is a database rather than some materials prepared for public presentation.

"It will be interesting to see who is on this list but I don't know," The Atlantic reported him as saying. "It will be interesting to see if there were members of Congress on this list, what kind of judicial review was provided."

The controversial discriminating practice of surveillance on US Muslims after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks came to public prominence in 2011, when The Associated Press reported on NYPD's spying on Muslims in New York City and neighboring New Jersey.

The revelation sparked outrage, with dozens Muslim leaders and human rights groups speaking out against it, but the practice was not abandoned until April 2014.

The controversy remains as the practice itself was ruled by a federal court to be a lawful anti-terrorism effort that didn't amount to civil-rights violation. The program's efficiency, however, was dubious at best, as police admitted that it didn't generate a single lead.