Five prominent Muslim-Americans were reportedly targeted along with a group of about 200 U.S. persons over a period of six years as part of the National Security Agency's foreign intelligence spying program.

The list included more than 7,400 emails that were monitored based on suspicions that the individuals were agents of or engaged with terrorists, according to The Intercept. About 202 email addresses belonged to U.S. residents, 1,782 belonged to "non-U.S. persons," and 5,501 were unknown.

The five Muslims included in that list were: Faisal Gill, who previously served in the Department of Homeland Security and once ran for public office as a member of the Republican Party; Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Asim Ghafoor, an attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases; Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University; and Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights, according to ABC.

Although monitoring ended in 2008, the information was released through documents taken by Edward Snowden.

The list of targeted individuals was authorized by a judge in the "top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," created by an act to allow such spying, and renewing authorization every 90 days for U.S. citizens if probable cause is found. But the justifications that warranted a renewal of authorization remain classified information.

Gill, a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, told The Intercept, "I've done everything in my life to be patriotic. I served in the Navy, served in the government, was active in my community -- I've done everything that a good citizen, in my opinion, should do."

But a former senior official told ABC that it's possible the names were not a list of targets.

"You should not assume all of the names Glenn Greenwald has were targets of surveillance," the senior official said.

A former senior official also told ABC that "The Intercept's reporters were repeatedly warned that they 'were getting it wrong' in how they interpreted what the NSA spreadsheets from Snowden signified. The documents also were curiously absent of the markings secret files typically carry which denote its specific level of classification and distribution limitations."

"We have very little idea what this probable cause standard means in individual FISA cases," says Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney for the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Intercept. "No FISA application or order has ever been publicly disclosed, even to a criminal defendant or his lawyer in cases where the government later brings charges based on that FISA surveillance."

Similarly, there previously was the New York Police Department's recently disbanded Zone Assessment Unit, which was used after 9/11 to monitor Muslim-owned businesses and mosques in the region.

The number of cases of spying on Americans raises questions about the power of the government. In response to the NYPD unit closing in April, a joint statement was issued by Muslim Advocates and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"What has to stop is the practice of suspicion-less surveillance of Muslim communities, not just the unit assigned to do it," according to the statement on CNN.

The five prominent Muslim-Americans that may have been targeted all held varying political and religious views, and were not linked to any terroristic activities in the six-year period.

In a statement by CAIR released Wednesday, the organization along with the ACLU is "insisting that President Obama provide a full public accounting of surveillance practices of American Muslim leaders."

The group also said that the White House did respond, calling for a review of training and policy materials for racial or religious bias, but did not comment on the surveillance issue.

The letter was signed by almost 50 other civil and religious rights groups, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"These practices hurt not only American Muslims, but all communities that expect law enforcement to serve and protect America's diverse populations equally," CAIR wrote in the letter. "They strike the bedrock of democracy: that no one should grow up fearful of law enforcement, scared to exercise the rights to freedom of speech, association and worship."

"The Obama administration continues to allow some government agencies to treat all Americans as objects of suspicion. It is time for a full public accounting regarding surveillance of American minorities."