An FBI surveillance aircraft flying near Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia

According to flight data, over the weekend an FBI surveillance plane carried out a protracted overflight of the city of Dearborn, Michigan. Some 30% of the city’s population is Arab-American, which has made it a regular target for FBI sting operations.

Despite this, the FBI is loudly denying that the spy plane was conducting surveillance of the Arab-American community in general, insisting they “don’t conduct mass surveillance,” though they did not offer any details on actually what they were surveilling, and maintained there were no threats in the area of the flight, which includes Metro Detroit.

Though some Arab-American groups took that denial at face value, saying there is no reason to doubt the FBI, many aren’t so sure, and indeed the FBI’s overflights of US cities have tended in recent times to be for untoward reasons.

The Justice Department has been conducting such overflights in so-called “dirtbox” planes, which mimic the signals of a cellphone satellite, but being in the air instead of in orbit, are then connected to ordinary Americans’ phones as the closer signal, allowing them to seize cellphone data en masse from the air. The FBI has recently conducted such flights for the Justice Department as well.

If this proves to be the nature of this most recent flight, the FBI could theoretically claim Arab-Americans aren’t being targeted as such. After all, it is everyone who is a target, or at least their cellphones. Still, the FBI’s denial that it conducts mass surveillance as a general rule is demonstrably false, and the overflight is just one more in a troubling trend.

This post written originally by Jason Ditz for AntiWar.com

Infamous Maricopa County Sheriff is requesting a new judge to handle his trial, and is also seeking help from the public for his legal fees.

Arpaio is currently on trial and awaiting judgment from US District Judge Murray Snow on whether he failed to adhere to a 2011 court order that required him to refrain from bias in treatment and investigation of minorities.

In a letter to his supporters, Arpaio says he doesn’t have enough money to pay for his attorneys, and claims he is the victim of unfair targeting by immigration rights groups who are suing him for alleged racist policies that target the Latino community.

“In some instances I have to personally pay for attorneys to represent me in these cases. I do not have the personal wealth or the wherewithal to keep up with the costly demands of paying for attorneys to defend me.”

— Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Arpaio has filed a motion for Judge Snow to be replaced because he believes the judge is personally connected to the case. Arpaio claims his former attorney authorized a secret investigation of Snow’s wife.

“No reasonable person with knowledge of the facts can deny that Judge Snow is now investigating and presiding over issues involving his own family,” wrote Arpaio’s attorneys in their filing.

In 2013 Snow ruled that the sheriff’s office was engaging in racial profiling targeting Latinos during immigration patrols and traffic stops.

Arpaio has successfully had a judge removed from a case in the past. In 2009, Arpaio’s attorneys had US District Judge Mary Marguia removed from the profiling case, alleging she was also too close. Marguia’s sister is the leader of a Latino rights organization.

He is currently scheduled to appear in court this June, but the date may be affected by his filing.