Glenn Greenwald: NYPD spy program targeted Muslims

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NYPD spying program aimed at Muslims

By Glenn Greenwald




The hallmark of a Surveillance State is that police agencies secretly monitor and keep dossiers on not only those individuals suspected of lawbreaking, but on the society generally, including those individuals about whom there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. For the past year, the Associated Press has systematically exposed how the New York Police Department, often working in conjunction with the CIA, engaged in a sprawling spying campaign aimed at Muslim individuals, students, institutions and mosques in the United States, all without a whiff of any suspected wrongdoing. Yesterday, the four AP investigative reporters who have exposed this program won a well-deserved Polk Award for their “investigation that showed the NYPD had built one of the largest domestic intelligence agencies in the country.” In particular, the “reporters documented how the NYPD assigned ‘rakers’ and ‘mosque crawlers’ to ethnic neighborhoods, infiltrating everything from booksellers and cafes to Muslim places of worship.”


On Monday, AP detailed how the NYPD spied on numerous Muslim students and their campus organizations. In particular, “police trawled daily through student websites run by Muslim student groups at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers and 13 other colleges in the Northeast” and “talked with local authorities about professors in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.” The dossiers noted the names of Muslim student leaders and even stored emails sent and received by some of them. All this, even though the “documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.”


Today, AP released a newly obtained report by the NYPD from 2007 about the Muslim community in Newark, New Jersey — both Middle Eastern and African-American in origin — prompting one of the AP reporters, Matt Apuzzo, to ask on Twitter: “If NYPD can write docs like this outside its jurisdiction, where cant they go? Post-9/11, is NYPD a nat’l police force?” As AP reported today about this newly released dossier: “Americans living and working in New Jersey’s largest city were subjected to surveillance as part of the New York Police Department’s effort to build databases of where Muslims work, shop and pray.” The report was produced as part of a surveillance campaign whereby “plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographics Units fanned out across Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims.” Yet again, “the report cited no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior,” but was meant to instead be “a guide to Newark’s Muslims.” AP continued:

Such surveillance has become commonplace in New York City in the decade since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police have built databases showing where Muslims live, where they buy groceries, even what Internet cafes they use and where they watch sports. Dozens of mosques and student groups have been infiltrated and police have built detailed profiles of ethnic communities, from Moroccans to Egyptians to Albanians. . . . The effect of the program was that hundreds of American citizens were cataloged — sometimes by name, sometimes simply by their businesses and their ethnicity — in secret police files that spanned hundreds of pages.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/nypd...ims/singleton/

reposted:

NYPD Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/ny...l?ref=nyregion

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On June 2, 2009, a janitor in an office building in New Brunswick, N.J., noticed what he thought was terrorist-related literature and sophisticated surveillance equipment in an office he had been assigned to clean. He told his boss, who called the local police, who notified the FBI. Later in the day, the FBI and the New Brunswick police broke into the office and discovered five men busily operating the equipment. Four of the men were police officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD), and the fifth was a CIA agent.


The conundrum faced by all of these public servants soon became apparent. Who should arrest whom?


Should the FBI agents and the local cops arrest the NYPD and the CIA agent for violating the U.S. and New Jersey constitutions, both of which prohibit searches and seizures without search warrants, and for violating federal and New Jersey laws against wiretapping and surveillance? Should the NYPD and the CIA agent arrest the FBI agents and the local cops for breaking and entering and obstructing a governmental function without a search warrant? Did the FBI and the local cops even have a search warrant? Was the NYPD/CIA surveillance a lawful governmental function?


No one at the scene of this unique encounter was arrested. In return for not becoming a defendant, everyone agreed not to become a complainant. The FBI and the New Brunswick police went home, and the NYPD cops and their CIA mentor went back to their surveillance -- even though everyone in that office had sworn the same oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the laws written pursuant to it.


Among those laws are the state statutes that limit the authority and jurisdiction of local cops to the municipality that employs them, and the federal statutes that limit the legal ability of CIA agents to steal secrets only from foreigners outside the U.S. Stated differently, the NYPD has no authority or jurisdiction to engage in surveillance in New Jersey, and the CIA has no authority or jurisdiction to engage in surveillance in the U.S.


Nevertheless, we now know from the candid admissions last week of NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly that the NYPD has been spying without search warrants on Muslim groups in New Jersey and elsewhere for 10 years. Former New Jersey acting governor and current state Sen. Richard Codey recalls authorizing the NYPD -- and not the CIA -- to inspect railroads and ferries that travel back and forth between New Jersey and New York in 2005. He says he never authorized surveillance. No public official in New Jersey has come forward to acknowledge awareness of all this, and Kelly says the spying will continue. But he needs a search warrant.

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http://townhall.com/columnists/judge..._new_brunswick

No NYPD defenders on SpursTalk? What's this country coming to?

In 2004 SpursReport thread I'd be inundated with spiteful suggestions...hell, in 2009 SpursTalk thread they were still coming...

What happened to all the hate?


Where's the hate?

went underground?

gotta be some haters lurking out there. where are you?

I read about this about a week ago. Terrible, but what can you do?

What's shameful is public officials turning a blind eye to this.

"what can you do"

nothing, absolutely nothing.

What will happen is that it will get much worse.

The authoritarian, abusive police state and police/etc raping the Constitution are unstoppable, and irreversible.

What corps have and are doing to "reasonable expectation of privacy" is actually much worse, but it's not the government, it's the worshipped "free capitalists" so nobody cares. Equally unstoppable and irreversible.

How many Congressional seats would it take? NEVER gonna happen.

Any politician campaigning on or speechifying on rolling back the police state and corporate surveillance would be shouted down by the right-wing hate media as soft on crime, as terrorist loving, as hating America, as traitor to America and America's "values".

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Originally Posted by ElNono

I read about this about a week ago. Terrible, but what can you do?

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You live in NJ, no? Whatever noise you make about it might count for little more than mine.

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

You live in NJ, no? Whatever noise you make about it might count for little more than mine.

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Noise like what? You don't hear a peep neither from the Republican governor or the Democratic legislature. Perhaps donating to the local ACLU is the way to go here.

You're a constituent. I'm just a loudmouth from Texas. Whose letter would you be more inclined to read if you were a NJ official?

I'm not surprised at all. I expect someone is listening to my phone calls or watching me on the internet.

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

You're a constituent. I'm just a loudmouth from Texas. Whose letter would you be more inclined to read if you were a NJ official?

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When they absolutely don't care, does it matter?

And I rather see a lawsuit, tbh

whose?

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In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism. And if police ever got a tip about, say, an Afghan terrorist in the city, they'd know where he was likely to rent a room, buy groceries and watch sports.

But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case.

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Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/...#ixzz24CoJ4qHz

reader's digest, big print version:

zero leads in six years

WH23, this one is for you... skip to 9:29

Blackadder is a new one on me. thanks for the link, LnGrrrR. :tu

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

Blackadder is a new one on me. thanks for the link, LnGrrrR. :tu

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Considered one of the better shows in British Comedy... Season 4 is quite good. (And if you watch House, you should recognize Hugh Laurie.)

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

reader's digest, bigger, bolder print version:

zero leads in six years

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Fixed. And bears repeating.

boo hoo. i'm as against surveillance as anyone, but in the case of these guys i don't think they have a leg to stand on.

And for those ZERO leads in 6 years, I wonder what the cost to the American/NY taxpayer is?

Dirty, worthless, cops + paranoid CIA fishing expeditions, equals bad news

Just awful

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Originally Posted by mavs>spurs

boo hoo. i'm as against surveillance as anyone, but in the case of these guys i don't think they have a leg to stand on.

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the NYPD? agree 100%.

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Originally Posted by mavs>spurs

i'm as against surveillance as anyone

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Except for anyone opposed to mass surveillance and profiling based on religion, yeah you're definitely as opposed to surveillance as anyone.

Let me guess, you call yourself a Libertarian too?

They should focus on the Mennonites. They are known terrorists.

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Originally Posted by Spurminator

Except for anyone opposed to mass surveillance and profiling based on religion, yeah you're definitely as opposed to surveillance as anyone.

Let me guess, you call yourself a Libertarian too?

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It's like going into the ghetto to crack down on crime, but refusing to question the suspicious looking black men for fear of "discrimination." So instead they target the one or two white/asians in the neighborhood and beat the hell out of them with tasers and throw them in prison on bogus charges.

That wouldn't make any sense, right? When all the suicide bombers are coming from one ethnic group, I'd say they warrant more than the average amount of suspicion. Stop thinking you're achieving anything by being mr politically correct liberal. You look like a clown and even the arabs being profiled don't respect you for it.

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Originally Posted by mavs>spurs

It's like going into the ghetto to crack down on crime, but refusing to question the suspicious looking black men for fear of "discrimination." So instead they target the one or two white/asians in the neighborhood and beat the hell out of them with tasers and throw them in prison on bogus charges.

That wouldn't make any sense, right? When all the suicide bombers are coming from one ethnic group, I'd say they warrant more than the average amount of suspicion. Stop thinking you're achieving anything by being mr politically correct liberal. You look like a clown and even the arabs being profiled don't respect you for it.

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:lol

I don't even know where to start.

That's one of the most shitful takes I've ever read, tbh.... terrorism has originated from just about every race and religion at one point or another, so profiling doesn't really solve anything tbh....

This American Life had a show about it in the past few weeks. I think 2 weeks ago.

the new NYPD chief shutters the program:

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The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the controversial surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.


To many Muslims, the squad, known as the Demographics Unit, was a sign that the police viewed their every action with suspicion. The police mapped communities inside and outside the city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch-counter conversations.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/ny...&nlid=59624939

"The Demographics Unit was trying to root out terrorist threats, but never produced a usable lead." :lol

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/16/303634...ied-on-muslims

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Following two lawsuits against the NYPD for its pervasive, rights-violating surveillance of the city's Muslims, the department's Inspector General took a look at a sampling of cases from 2010-2015 to see if the Handschu Agreement -- crafted in 1985 and heavily modified in 2002 -- was being followed. The short answer is "No." So is the long answer [PDF].


The guideline was part of a consent decree created in response to pervasive NYPD surveillance of activities protected by the First Amendment, even when no unlawful activity was suspected. The guideline worked for awhile, but the 9/11 attacks changed that. The NYPD brought in two former CIA employees who decided to turn a domestic law enforcement agency into Langley on the Hudson. Former CIA officer David Cohen used terrorism fears to compel a judge to significantly modify the Handschu Agreement.


From that point on, the NYPD steadily abused the revamped agreement. Its "Demographics Unit" designatedentire mosques as terrorist entities, placed the city's Muslims under surveillance, and -- best of all -- generated zero leads.

The Inspector General's report points out that the NYPD couldn't even comply with the relaxed, post-9/11 Handschu Agreement. Instead, the Demographics Unit copy-pasted justifications for pervasive surveillance and passed them up the ladder to the rubber stamps handling the approval process.

OIG-NYPD’s investigation found that NYPD, while able to articulate a valid basis for commencing investigations, was often non-compliant with a number of the rules governing the conduct of these investigations. For example, when applying for permission to use an undercover officer or confidential informant, the application must state the particular role of the undercover in that specific investigation, so that the need for this intrusive technique can be evaluated. NYPD almost never included such a fact-specific discussion in its applications, but instead repeatedly used generic, boilerplate text to seek such permission. Tellingly, this boilerplate text was so routine that the same typographical error had been cut and pasted into virtually every application OIG-NYPD reviewed, going back over a decade.

TheNYPD's response [PDF] to the report disputes the accusation of using boilerplate permission slips. But that's all it does. It fails to explain how each individual request somehow contained the same typographical error. Repeatedly. For fourteen years.

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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...idelines.shtml

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Once an investigation was under way, NYPD supervisors tended to take a very hands-off approach.

Further, among all cases reviewed, NYPD continued its investigations even after legal authorization expired more than half of the time. Often more than a month of unauthorized investigation occurred before NYPD belatedly sought to renew the authorization.

As the IG points out, this is completely unacceptable. The Agreement is there for a reason: to prevent unlawful surveillance. But the NYPD is left alone to ensure its own compliance with the guideline. There's no judicial oversight of these activities -- not like there is with searches, seizures, and stops. Left to police itself, the NYPD proved unworthy of the trust placed in it.

These failures cannot be dismissed or minimized as paperwork or administrative errors. The very reason these rules were established was to mandate rigorous internal controls to ensure that investigations of political activity – which allow NYPD to intrude into the public and private aspects of people’s lives – were limited in time and scope and to ensure that constitutional rights were not threatened.



[...]
As a result, until OIG-NYPD conducted this review, there had never been any routine, independent third-party review to ensure compliance with these rules. NYPD's compliance failures demonstrate the need for ongoing oversight, which OIG-NYPD will now provide.

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see what happens when PDs are allowed to run surveillance without accountability or oversight?

rights of US citizens violated for over a decade, no bad guys caught.

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As is evidenced by the Inspector General's findings -- and the NYPD's own admissions -- the department has never been interested in accountability. It's far more interested in pretending it's the DEA, FBI, CIA, and NSA all rolled into one local law enforcement office. And it operates with a level of opacity surpassing the federal agencies it aspires to be.

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Originally Posted by Winehole23

see what happens when PDs are allowed to run surveillance without accountability or oversight?

rights of US citizens violated for over a decade, no bad guys caught.

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Considering the targets, I don't think you're going to get more than a shrug from the people who are okay with the BPD program.

You're going to have to wait for secret government surveillance of white, male gun owners to generate any kind of concern from them.

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Originally Posted by Spurminator

Considering the targets, I don't think you're going to get more than a shrug from the people who are okay with the BPD program.

You're going to have to wait for secret government surveillance of white, male gun owners to generate any kind of concern from them.

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I could have sworn Barry already enacted that program with his cell phone and a stroke of his pen.

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Originally Posted by Spurminator

Considering the targets, I don't think you're going to get more than a shrug from the people who are okay with the BPD program.

You're going to have to wait for secret government surveillance of white, male gun owners to generate any kind of concern from them.

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Cringing at the infinitessimal threat of terrorism, they prostrate themselves before the authority of the state. I still don't get why 9/11 means we have to throw away our liberty.

What happened to keep calm and carry on?

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Originally Posted by Spurminator

Considering the targets, I don't think you're going to get more than a shrug from the people who are okay with the BPD program.

You're going to have to wait for secret government surveillance of white, male gun owners to generate any kind of concern from them.

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Google up NSA or National Security Agency...

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Originally Posted by Th'Pusher

I could have sworn Barry already enacted that program with his cell phone and a stroke of his pen.

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Originally Posted by hater

Google up NSA or National Security Agency...

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I'm talking about a situation where it was revealed that a law enforcement agency was monitoring the activities of gun owners without any prior announcement that this was taking place.

Anything about the NSA that would be found on Google, or discussed by President Obama, is not, by definition, secret.

And if that has already happened, tell me how gun owners reacted to this discovery... Could the reaction be summed up as "If you're not doing anything illegal you have nothing to worry about"?

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Originally Posted by Spurminator

I'm talking about a situation where it was revealed that a law enforcement agency was monitoring the activities of gun owners without any prior announcement that this was taking place.

Anything about the NSA that would be found on Google, or discussed by President Obama, is not, by definition, secret.

And if that has already happened, tell me how gun owners reacted to this discovery... Could the reaction be summed up as "If you're not doing anything illegal you have nothing to worry about"?

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My response was intended in jest. I should have put it in blue...

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment.