An FBI agent grew so disillusioned with the agency's workings that he became a whistleblower and leaked documents showing how racist methods led to the targeting of Muslim communities, according to a story in New York Times early this month.

The New York Times piece is a result of three years of interview with Albury.

FBI agent Terry Albury joined the FBI before 9/11 but he soon grew disillusioned when he realized that the agency, in their search for terrorists following 9/11, manufactured the threat of Islamic extremism.

"But the war on terror is like this game, right? We’ve built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque, and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have promoted that false notion, we have to validate it," he is quoted in the article as saying.

"So we catch some kid who doesn’t know his ear from his [expletive] for building a bomb fed to them by the F.B.I., or we take people from foreign countries where they have secret police and recruit them as informants and capitalize on their fear to ensure there is compliance. It’s a very dangerous and toxic environment, and we have not come to terms with the fact that maybe we really screwed up here. Maybe what we’re doing is wrong.”

In 2018, Albury was sentenced to four years for leaking the documents to the Intercept. The judge who sentenced him said he did so because Albury's leak "put the country at risk."

When The Intercept first began reporting on Albury, they quoted his lawyer as describing his motives as: “to alert the U.S. public to practices and procedures that he believed represented both a systemic departure from the FBI’s proper mission in counterterrorism, and abuses of the enormous investigative authority the FBI has been granted since 9/11."

The government, however, the Intercept noted that Albury was a criminal, who "stole information from more than 70 documents, including about 50 classified ones, taking photographs and copying and pasting them in order to avoid detection."

“This case is not about race. Nor is it about blowing any whistles,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “What it is about is the unlawful transmission and retention of classified national defense information by someone who fully understood how wrong his conduct was.”

But Albury's actions and telling of his experience to the Intercept and again in The New York Times ahead of the 9/11 anniversary tell a frightening tale of the lengths the FBI went to surveil Muslim communities.

Its publication has been hailed as bold, courageous.