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reposted:
NYPD Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/ny...l?ref=nyregion
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/nypd...ims/singleton/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 su ion 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, ins utions 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 do ented 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 “do ents 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.
reposted:
NYPD Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/ny...l?ref=nyregion
http://townhall.com/columnists/judge..._new_brunswickOn 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 cons utions, 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. Cons ution 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.
No NYPD defenders on SpursTalk? What's this country coming to?
In 2004 SpursReport thread I'd be inundated with spiteful suggestions... , 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 Cons ution 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".
Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-03-2012 at 10:28 AM.
You live in NJ, no? Whatever noise you make about it might count for little more than mine.
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 cons uent. 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.
When they absolutely don't care, does it matter?
And I rather see a lawsuit, tbh
whose?
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.
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.
Considered one of the better shows in British Comedy... Season 4 is quite good. (And if you watch House, you should recognize Hugh Laurie.)Blackadder is a new one on me. thanks for the link, LnGrrrR.
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
the NYPD? agree 100%.
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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