The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program

Ramzi Kassem | TheNation.com | June 13, 2012 | [Original Article] 

"The stories are as remarkable for their banality as for their detail.
 
On February 8, 2006, the imam at a Bronx mosque advised congregants to boycott Danish products in response to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper. In November 2006, a member of the Muslim Students Association at the state university in Buffalo forwarded an e-mail to a Yahoo chat group advertising a conference featuring various Muslim scholars. And in April 2008, college students on a rafting trip discussed religion and prayed “at least four times a day.”

What the imam and students didn’t know was that members of the New York Police Department Intelligence Division were spying on them and recording their names and actions in secret reports forwarded to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. None of these people had done anything wrong or even suspect: they were simply Muslims practicing their constitutionally protected freedoms of religious belief and speech. But for today’s police, that was enough to earn them a place in the department’s secret counterterrorism database.

As the Associated Press revealed in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of exposés, the New York Police Department has been engaged in a vast domestic spying operation targeting Muslims for surveillance, mapping and infiltration. Stretching from the heart of New York City to the border of Canada—by way of Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island—the program is as massive in scope as it is in ambition. In the name of total security, the NYPD treated basic acts of daily living as potential crimes, disregarding privacy and the freedom of speech and religion. Traditional barriers between foreign and domestic spying were partially collapsed. And the “war on terror” took lessons from the war on crime. In the process, the NYPD created perhaps the largest spying program by a local law enforcement agency on record—a sprawling effort to map entire communities that emerged from the toxic convergence of the permanent state of emergency gripping our society since 9/11 with the NYPD’s historic propensities..."[Read More]