WSJ Op-Ed Pushes Controversial NYPD Surveillance Of American Muslims

(Media Matters)

Fox News contributor Judith Miller wrote a highly speculative Wall Street Journal op-ed that claimed New York City police surveillance practices “may well have… prevented” the Boston bombing, ignoring that the constitutionality of these programs is currently being challenged in court and their efficacy is questioned.

In the April 24 op-ed, Miller lauded the New York Police Department (NYPD) for its blanket surveillance of American Muslim communities, which has extended beyond the jurisdiction of New York City. According to Miller, this extensive spying program “is a model of how to identify and stop killers like the Tsarnaev brothers before they strike” and should be emulated by other cities. From the WSJ:

[T]he city has developed a counterterror program that is a model of how to identify and stop killers like the Tsarnaev brothers before they strike. The 1,000 cops and analysts who work in the NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism divisions, for instance, would likely have flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for surveillance, given Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s insistence on aggressively monitoring groups and individuals suspected of radicalization.

[...]

The NYPD maintains close ties to Muslim preachers and community leaders, as well as a network of tipsters and undercover operatives.

Once the department had Tamerlan under surveillance, the NYPD’s cyberunit might have detected his suspicious online viewing choices and social-media postings. Other detectives might have picked up his purchase of a weapon, gunpowder and even a pressure cooker–an item featured in an article, “How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” in the online al Qaeda magazine Inspire.

Even if the NYPD hadn’t been watching Tamerlan, it might have been tipped off to such suspicious purchases thanks to its Nexus program. Since the program’s launch in 2002, the department has visited more than 40,000 businesses in the metropolitan area, encouraging business owners and managers to report suspicious purchases or other activities potentially related to terrorism.

These surveillance programs – like other aspects of NYPD’s aggressive policing - are currently beingchallenged in court. But Miller ignored claims that the spying unconstitutionally profiles American Muslims, interferes with freedom of religion rights under the First Amendment, and violates a court order that attempts to ensure surveillance focuses on illegal activity.

Furthermore, although she mentions it won a Pulitzer Prize, Miller completely ignores the substance of an Associated Press series critical of these programs. The AP’s award-winning reporting on the NYPD’s surveillance unearthed multiple details that undermine Miller’s narrative. For example:

• The “network of tipsters and undercover operatives” described by Miller were explained by AP to be paid informants for the NYPD that “‘bait’ Muslims into saying inflammatory things” and “trawl the mosques — known informally as ‘mosque crawlers’ — [to] tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there’s no evidence they committed a crime.”
• The op-ed’s description of the NYPD’s search for “warning signs among New York’s Muslim population” was reported by AP to be racial profiling that “put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity.”
• The NYPD’s monitoring of mosques through “close ties to Muslim preachers and community leaders” – as described by Miller – was reported in the AP series as “targeting mosques and their congregations with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations,” resulting in situations where “the same mosques that city leaders visited to hail their strong alliances with the Muslim community have also been placed under NYPD surveillance — in some cases infiltrated by undercover police officers and informants.”
• Miller’s detail that the NYPD visited “more than 40,000 businesses in the metropolitan area, encouraging business owners and managers to report suspicious purchases or other activities potentially related to terrorism” was described by AP as part of an aborted collaboration with the CIA that entailed “surveillance of entire neighborhoods” and “intelligence databases” of “Muslims not suspected of any wrongdoing.”
• Miller’s assurance that “court-ordered guidelines” controlled the NYPD’s “plainclothes officers [covertly sent] to mosques, restaurants and other public venues where Muslims congregate” was a reference to a revised 1985 settlement over previous illegal spying, which the AP reported is the core of ongoing litigation over its potential violation due to “intrusive methods to conduct investigations into organizations and individuals associated with Islam and the Muslim community in New York even though there were no signs of unlawful activity.”

This AP coverage led to lawsuits filed over the programs’ constitutionality and public grievances by state and federal officials worried about the unsupervised reach and nature of these NYPD surveillance efforts.

Yet this is arguably a separate issue from whether the programs actually work to prevent terrorist attacks, which Miller highlights as worthy of a “fresh look” across the country. That is, some say the potential illegality of this widespread and indiscriminate surveillance of American Muslims is irrelevant if its utility is worth breaking from American tradition and law. But according to AP’s reporting, this too is questionable, as the core of the surveillance program “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.” From the AP:

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.

An American Muslim man prays at a New York City mosque.

Police Spying on American Muslims Is a Pointless National Shame 

Muslim rights groups at Foley Square on February 3, 2011 protesting NYPD surveillance of Muslims in the city. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

Report: NYPD’s Surveillance of Muslims ‘Harmful’

The New York Police Department’s surveillance of the Muslim community has had harmful consequences, according to a report being released Monday from the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition and its partners.

How many more lawsuits will it take for the NYPD to cease monitoring American citizens without a good explanation?

Muslims shouldn’t feel singled out:

The Muslim surveillance program is only the latest in a series of NYPD intelligence operations run amok. From 1909 to the 1980s, the Department created files on more than 1.2 million New Yorkers and shared them with private investigators, university administrators, prospective employers and professional associations like the New York Bar Association.

NYPD Muslim spying operation takes ‘security’ to an unjustified extreme

by Faiza Patel and Amos Toh, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 February 2013

The New York Police Department’s Muslim surveillance operation, set up under the direction of an ex-CIA operative, deployed undercover officers and informants in mosques, schools, restaurants, and bodegas throughout the city to spy on the daily lives of thousands of Americans.

Reams of information about innocuous activity landed up in police files. Unsurprisingly, these indiscriminate operations have proven ineffective.NYPD Intelligence Chief Thomas Galati made no bones about the fact that a key part of the program never turned up a lead worth pursuing.

After the Associated Press revealed that the NYPD had placed entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance, police commissioner Raymond Kelly vigorously defended the program.

The police acted in accordance with rigorous court-ordered rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines, he claimed. But that defense isn’t holding up well. The very lawyers charged with monitoring enforcement of the Handschu Guidelines filed a motion arguing that the department had violated key rules. They asked a federal judge to order the NYPD to stop spying on Muslims and to purge police records of private conversations that had nothing to do with crime or terrorism.

That wasn’t all. Given the NYPD’s persistent failure to abide by the guidelines, the Handschu lawyers also asked the court to appoint an independent monitor. They were right to do so.

The Muslim surveillance program is only the latest in a series of NYPD intelligence operations run amok. From 1909 to the 1980s, the Department created files on more than 1.2 million New Yorkers and shared them with private investigators, university administrators, prospective employers and professional associations like the New York Bar Association.

In the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, undercover officers fanned out across 15 US cities and abroad to spy on people planning to protest the convention. The Occupy Wall Street movement came under intense police scrutiny as officers interrogated protesters and visited the homes of organizers.

The Handschu Guidelines, which, in theory, regulate these operations, were developed in the 1980s as part of the settlement of a class action lawsuit by political groups that claimed that they had been spied upon and infiltrated by the NYPD. Although modified after 9/11 to give the department greater flexibility, they continue to impose vital checks on the department’s ability to investigate political activity and record it in their files.

Under the guidelines, the police can only investigate political activity where they have a “lead,” indicating unlawful activity (pdf). The police commissioner has repeatedly asserted that this is just what the NYPD did and that it did not target Muslims “on the basis of their religious affiliation“.

But the police documents reviewed by the Handschu lawyers tell a different story:

“the concentration on things Muslim arises out of the prejudice that the NYPD has brought to its program … the NYPD supposes that because an organization is connected to Islam, therefore it is suspect.”

Not only is this approach unconstitutional, it also flies in the face of government and academic studies showing that one cannot predict who will become a terrorist based on how religious they are.

Commissioner Kelly also defended the Muslim surveillance program on the grounds that the Handschu Guidelines authorize the NYPD to “visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public”. But the guidelines require the police to review the information collected from these visits and purge those parts that do not relate to suspected criminal or terrorist activity.

This compromise was reached to take account of the interest of the NYPD in monitoring lawful activity that might be related to terrorism and at the same time ensure that the police did not trample on First Amendment rights by keeping dossiers on law-abiding New Yorkers.

As Chief Galati freely admitted, the NYPD has made no effort to comply with this requirement. It has no policies or procedures to review or remove information.

Instead, the police take the position that everything that Muslims say or do is – or at least potentially could be – relevant to some hypothetical future terrorist attack or crime. So the NYPD continues to maintain thousands of records containing the conversations, whereabouts and personal details of law-abiding Americans.

Past surveillance scandals illustrate the dangers of keeping such files, particularly during moments of perceived national security crisis. Secret dossiers have been used to begin unjustified investigations into political activity. In 2008, for example, Maryland state police used its dossiers on activists to open a file on Amnesty International for the possible “crime” of “civil rights”. Information about people’s personal lives was used to blackmail and pressure innocent Americans, most famously, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose views were unpopular with law enforcement.

The NYPD’s pattern of failing to comply with the law is facilitated by a chronic lack of oversight. The police operate largely unchecked, with no day-to-day independent oversight.

As the Handschu filing shows, it is difficult for a court to oversee the department’s actions without an independent monitor. The violations of agreed-upon rules went on for years and only came to light through the work of investigative reporters. Indeed, the Handschu lawyers’ request for an independent monitor echoes what the Brennan Center for Justice and other civil society groups have long called for: an inspector general for the NYPD.

An inspector general would have the powers and resources to review the legality of the department’s policies and operations on an ongoing basis. That way we won’t have to wait for a scandal and enterprising reporters to make sure the police are complying with the law.

Hussein Rashid is a native New Yorker and Proud Muslim. Currently an instructor at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry at Park Avenue Christian Church and based at Hofstra University, he is deeply committed to interfaith work and is passionate about teaching. He believes we need to start talking more intelligently about Islam specifically, and religion generally.

Islamophobia is Real, Mr. Mayor—A New York City Muslim Explains

Post by HUSSEIN RASHID

My colleague, Haroon Moghul, wrote a masterful piece here called “What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?” In it, he expounds on the myths that serve as the bases for Islamophobia. His voice is one of a growing chorus that shows that Islamophobia exists and has a persistent logic of its own, often grounded in anti-Semitic tropes.

In fact, one of the amazing elements of Islamophobia is the denial of its own existence—as Nathan Lean explains. In his article, Lean also offers several examples of the impact Islamophobia has had on the lives of Americans; Wajahat Ali has written about the fear and death that an Islamophobic environment sanctions; Erik Love gives us sociological background on the impact of Islamophobia. I want to offer a reflection of what a New York Muslim sees and hears as Islamophobia becomes so normalized that it becomes an institution.

Let’s begin with the double-standard tango. We hear about about an Alabama teen who is reported to have a near-operational plot to attack his school. He is allowed to go back home. A couple in New York, where one partner is a serial offender, is found with explosives in their apartment, ready to blow things up. In both cases, there is no ongoing coverage of these attempted terrorist plots. They are released on bail and told to behave themselves. Yet, any Muslim who meets another Muslim is tarred by six degrees of separation as being a potential terrorist, deserving of NYPD surveillance.

The situation of the NYPD is one of the great travesties of Muslim life in the city. The extensive program has, admittedly, resulted in no leads. We at RD have covered the betrayalof trust that Mayor Bloomberg’s policies represent. This betrayal is further compounded by the fact that members of the NYPD call it the “most corrupt police department,” and try to harass people for exercising their freedom of expression. Yet, by giving them unsupervised, unchallenged power, Mayor Bloomberg makes it easy for them start with the assumption that Muslims are guilty until proven innocent. And again, much like the Islamophobia Industry denying Islamophobia in the presence of a preponderance of evidence, no NYPD policy changes, despite the overwhelming evidence that the surveillance is misplaced.

This type of Islamophobia is becoming so ingrained into the mayor’s administration, that when Sunando Sen was slaughtered on the altar of Islamophobia, the mayor urged us to remember that while it was sad, it was okay because the real story was how cool the NYPD was. This statement was a day after he talked about the unappreciated deaths of the 34 people killed everyday by gun violence. Clearly, some causes of violence and some victims of violence are to be appreciated more than others.

If the words of Fox News can lead to an arson attack against a mosque, and general Islamophobia results in knifings in pizzerias, then the words and actions of the Mayor of New York have a much more profound impact.

Muslims in the city are bombarded by media coverage that paints us as suspect. The city’s police department paints us as suspect. Advertising in the veins of the city paints us as suspect. The mayor made a rousing speech during the Park51 controversy, but he has not internalized or exemplified those words. We are a community besieged by Islamophobia. Instead of building strong, resilient communities, we are left with “Be safe,” as our most potent protection. We cannot trust the police, we cannot trust people on the subway, and the mayor fiddles.

Islamophobia is real. People die because of it. Communities are weakened, and the only people profiting from it are the police state and the Islamophobia Industry. As a New York Muslim, I hope Mayor Bloomberg leaves us a better legacy than bike lanes and broken communities.

Jeffrey Chiesa

NYPD Muslim Spying: New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa Visits Mosque Listed In Secret Report

By SAMANTHA HENRY

NEWARK, N.J. — New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa quietly visited a Newark mosque Friday that had been listed in a secret report by the New York Police Department, and he reassured worshippers that New Jersey officials do not believe certain groups of citizens have lesser rights than others.

Chiesa attended prayer services at Masjid Ibrahim, a modest, single-story mosque set up inside a ramshackle former commercial space in Newark. The mosque was among several in the report by the NYPD, which conducted surveillance of Muslims in New Jersey and elsewhere.

“It is not tolerable here in New Jersey for us to have people treated differently in this state – period,” Chiesa said.

The attorney general’s visit was part of an ongoing effort by his office to repair relations between Muslims and New Jersey law enforcement after The Associated Press uncovered the NYPD spying. The NYPD has said its actions were legal and it has the right to travel to other cities in carrying out its duties.

Explaining to mosque-goers that he had only been in office about a month when the NYPD spying came to light, Chiesa said he was there to listen and answer questions from the community. He said he understood how badly he and his family would feel if they had been subjected to spying at their church or made to feel they could not freely practice their religion.

The mosque’s imam, Mustafa El-Amin, is a member of the Muslim outreach committee formed by Chiesa’s office in the wake of the NYPD revelations. He has gained a following for oratory that translates the teachings of the Quran into modern-day parables, relevant to his largely poor and working-class African-American congregants.

El-Amin’s sermon on Friday was somewhat tailored to his visitors. He emphasized that Islam is a religion of peace and explained the significance of Friday prayers.

“It’s not a conspiracy session. It’s not a session where we plot anything bad,” El-Amin said of Friday prayers. “All are welcome. Our doors are always open. We have nothing to hide.”

Chiesa conducted a fact-finding review in the wake of the spying scandal, and concluded the NYPD had not violated any New Jersey laws. The findings angered many New Jersey Muslims, who felt they had no state recourse to end the spying. Eight Muslims filed a federal lawsuit in New Jersey against the NYPD in June.

Chiesa has said that New York police now meet regularly with New Jersey law enforcement to discuss counterterrorism intelligence and operations. He has also issued a directive requiring New Jersey law enforcement agencies to notify the New Jersey State Police Counter-Terrorism Bureau and the Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness if they hear of outside departments working in New Jersey. Assemblyman Charles Mainor also has introduced legislation that would give such guidelines the weight of law.

Jewish, Hindu and Muslim leaders condemn attack at Queens mosque

By Joe Anuta

Jewish, Hindu and Muslim leaders from Queens gathered with lawmakers to denounce the possible hate crime committed at a Kew Gardens Hills Mosque earlier this month, and city Comptroller John Liu suggested some of the NYPD’s policies could make bias crimes more common.

“An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Imam Shamsi Ali, of the Jamaica Muslim Center, who gathered religious leaders from around Flushing in the wake of the Nov. 18 attack.

At about 5 a.m., 57-year-old Bashir Amad was opening the doors of the mosque for morning prayers when he was beaten, bitten and stabbed by a suspect police described as a 6-foot white man between the ages of 35 and 45 and weighing 180 pounds. According to the NYPD, the man shouted anti-Muslim statements before ambushing Bashir outside the house of worship, at 72-55 Kissena Blvd. As of press time Tuesday no arrests had been made.

Liu condemned the incident and called for justice, assuring everyone that the NYPD was following all possible leads to find the attacker.

But he also contended that policies, like the NYPD’s practice of monitoring Muslims or barring Sikhs from wearing religious headwear while on the job, sends the message that it is acceptable to discriminate against these groups.

“Unfortunately, when Muslims are singled out for profiling, surveillance and other discriminatory actions, hate crimes such as this are more likely,” he said.

Liu was referring to the NYPD’s controversial practice of infiltrating and monitoring mosques and student and business groups, even though the intelligence did not produce any indictments.

The Police Department and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have defended the practice as essential to protecting the city from terror attacks.

To show solidarity after the Kissena Boulevard attack, Ali called leaders from other houses of worship who gathered to decry the possible hate crime.

“Let’s not pretend we are all the same,” said Dr. Uma Mysorekar, of the Hindu Temple Society of North America. “We are different, but let’s respect those differences.”

Mysorekar stood with Amad and other members of the mosque, along with Rabbi Michael Weisser, of Flushing’s Free Synagogue, who also encouraged tolerance and understanding between the different faiths.

“No act like this will drive us apart — eventually that will only draw us closer together,” he said.

Bashir gave conflicting reports to various media outlets in the aftermath of the incident, telling some newspapers he did not hold a grudge against his attacker, but telling the New York Post, “If I see him again, I will kill him from 20 feet away.”

Reach reporter Joe Anuta by e-mail at januta@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.

Original post: Mosque attacker still on the loose: NYPD

Shamiur Rahman with Imam Siraj Wahhaj

Shamiur Rahman realized that what he was doing was not really helping protect the USA.:

Informant: NYPD paid me to ‘bait’ Muslims

NEW YORK (AP) — A paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

“We need you to pretend to be one of them,” Rahman recalled the police telling him. “It’s street theater.”

Rahman said he now believes his work as an informant against Muslims in New York was “detrimental to the Constitution.” After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police — and after he told the police that he had been contacted by the AP — he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.

Rahman’s account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighborhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using.

The AP corroborated Rahman’s account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between Rahman and his police handler. The AP also reviewed the photos Rahman sent to police. Friends confirmed Rahman was at certain events when he said he was there, and former NYPD officials, while not personally familiar with Rahman, said the tactics he described were used by informants.

Informants like Rahman are a central component of the NYPD’s wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighborhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there’s no evidence they committed a crime.

The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.

Police recruited Rahman in late January, after his third arrest on misdemeanor drug charges, which Rahman believed would lead to serious legal consequences. An NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in a Queens jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around.

The next month, Rahman said, he was on the NYPD’s payroll.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not immediately return a message seeking comment about Tuesday. He has denied widespread NYPD spying, saying police only follow leads.

In an Oct. 15 interview with the AP, however, Rahman said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.” He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.

Rahman said he thought he was doing important work protecting New York City and considered himself a hero.

One of his earliest assignments was to spy on a lecture at the Muslim Student Association at John Jay College in Manhattan. The speaker was Ali Abdul Karim, the head of security at the Masjid At-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn. The NYPD had been concerned about Karim for years and already had infiltrated the mosque, according to NYPD documents obtained by the AP.

Rahman also was instructed to monitor the student group itself, though he wasn’t told to target anyone specifically. His NYPD handler, Steve, told him to take pictures of people at the events, determine who belonged to the student association and identify its leadership.

On Feb. 23, Rahman attended the event with Karim and listened, ready to catch what he called a “speaker’s gaffe.” The NYPD was interested in buzz words such as “jihad” and “revolution,” he said. Any radical rhetoric, the NYPD told him, needed to be reported.

Talha Shahbaz, then the vice president of the student group, met Rahman at the event. As Karim was finishing his talk on Malcolm X’s legacy, Rahman told Shahbaz that he wanted to know more about the student group. They had briefly attended the same high school in Queens.

Rahman said he wanted to turn his life around and stop using drugs, and said he believed Islam could provide a purpose in life. In the following days, Rahman friended him on Facebook and the two exchanged phone numbers. Shahbaz, a Pakistani who came to the U.S. more three years ago, introduced Rahman to other Muslims.

“He was telling us how he loved Islam and it’s changing him,” said Asad Dandia, who also became friends with Rahman.

Secretly, Rahman was mining his new friends for details about their lives, taking pictures of them when they ate at restaurants and writing down license plates on the orders of the NYPD.

On the NYPD’s instructions, he went to more events at John Jay, including when Siraj Wahhaj spoke in May. Wahhaj, 62, is a prominent but controversial New York imam who has attracted the attention of authorities for years. Prosecutors included his name on a 3 ½-page list of people they said “may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never charged. In 2004, the NYPD placed Wahhaj on an internal terrorism watch list and noted: “Political ideology moderately radical and anti-American.”

That evening at John Jay, a friend took a photograph of Wahhaj with a grinning Rahman.

Rahman said he kept an eye on the MSA and used Shahbaz and his friends to facilitate traveling to events organized by the Islamic Circle of North America and Muslim American Society. The society’s annual convention in Hartford, Conn, draws a large number of Muslims and plenty of attention from the NYPD. According to NYPD documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD sent three informants there in 2008 and was keeping tabs on the group’s former president.

Rahman was told to spy on the speakers and collect information. The conference was dubbed “Defending Religious Freedom.” Shahbaz paid Rahman’s travel expenses.

Rahman, who was born in Queens, said he never witnessed any criminal activity or saw anybody do anything wrong.

He said he sometimes intentionally misinterpreted what people had said. For example, Rahman said he would ask people what they thought about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, knowing the subject was inflammatory. It was easy to take statements out of context, he said. He said wanted to please his NYPD handler, whom he trusted and liked.

“I was trying to get money,” Rahman said. “I was playing the game.”

Rahman said police never discussed the activities of the people he was assigned to target for spying. He said police told him once, “We don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. We just need to be sure.”

On some days, Rahman’s spent hours and covered miles in his undercover role. On Sept. 16, for example, he made his way in the morning to the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, snapping photographs of an imam and the sign-up sheet for those attending a regular class on Islamic instruction. He also provided their cell phone numbers to the NYPD. That evening he spied on people at Masjid Al-Ansar, also in Brooklyn.

Text messages on his phone showed that Rahman also took pictures last month of people attending the 27th annual Muslim Day Parade in Manhattan. The parade’s grand marshal was New York City Councilman Robert Jackson.

Rahman said he eventually tired of spying on his friends, noting that at times they delivered food to needy Muslim families. He said he once identified another NYPD informant spying on him. He took $200 more from the NYPD and told them he was done as an informant. He said the NYPD offered him more money, which he declined. He told friends on Facebook in early October that he had been a police spy but had quit. He also traded Facebook messages with Shahbaz, admitting he had spied on students at John Jay.

“I was an informant for the NYPD, for a little while, to investigate terrorism,” he wrote on Oct. 2. He said he no longer thought it was right. Perhaps he had been hunting terrorists, he said, “but I doubt it.”

Shahbaz said he forgave Rahman.

“I hated that I was using people to make money,” Rahman said. “I made a mistake.”

Not only was it a “waste of time” but it was also WRONG (h/t:OmarBaddar):

NYPD: Muslim Spying Led To No Leads, Terror Cases

By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO (Huffington Post)

NEW YORK — 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.

“Related to Demographics,” Galati testified that information that has come in “has not commenced an investigation.”

The NYPD is the largest police department in the nation and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has held up its counterterrorism tactics as a model for the rest of the country. After The Associated Press began reporting on those tactics last year, supporters argued that the Demographics Unit was central to keeping the city safe. Galati testified that it was an important tool, but conceded it had not generated any leads.

“I never made a lead from rhetoric that came from a Demographics report, and I’m here since 2006,” he said. “I don’t recall other ones prior to my arrival. Again, that’s always a possibility. I am not aware of any.”

Galati, the commanding officer of the NYPD Intelligence Division, offered the first official look at the Demographics Unit, which the NYPD denied ever existed when it was revealed by the AP last year. He described how police gather information on people even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, simply because of their ethnicity and native language.

As a rule, Galati said, a business can be labeled a “location of concern” whenever police can expect to find groups of Middle Easterners there.

Galati testified as part of a lawsuit that began in 1971 over NYPD spying on students, civil rights groups and suspected Communist sympathizers during the 1950s and 1960s. The lawsuit, known as the Handschu case, resulted in federal guidelines that prohibit the NYPD from collecting information about political speech unless it is related to potential terrorism.

Civil rights lawyers believe the Demographics Unit violated those rules. Documents obtained by the AP show the unit conducted operations outside its jurisdiction, including in New Jersey. The FBI there said those operations damaged its partnerships with Muslims and jeopardized national security.

Read the rest…

More revelations in the NYPD spying scandal. This time the not so bright undercover agents were uncovered by building superintendent Salil Sheth.:

‘What?’ Confused 911 caller outs NYPD spying in NJ

Associated Press

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — It’s an audiotape the New York Police Department hoped you would never hear.

A building superintendent at an apartment complex just off the Rutgers University campus called the New Brunswick Police 911 line in June 2009. He said his staff had been conducting a routine inspection and came across something suspicious.

“What’s suspicious?” the dispatcher asked.

“Suspicious in the sense that the apartment has about — has no furniture except two beds, has no clothing, has New York City Police Department radios.”

“Really?” the dispatcher asked, her voice rising with surprise.

The caller, Salil Sheth, had stumbled upon one of the NYPD’s biggest secrets: a safe house, a place where undercover officers working well outside the department’s jurisdiction could lie low and coordinate surveillance. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the NYPD, with training and guidance from the CIA, has monitored the activities of Muslims in New York and far beyond. Detectives infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and kept tabs on Muslim student groups, including at Rutgers.

The NYPD kept files on innocent sermons, recorded the names of political organizers in police documents and built databases of where Muslims lived and shopped, even where they were likely to gather to watch sports. Out-of-state operations, like the one in New Brunswick, were one aspect of this larger intelligence-gathering effort. The Associated Press previously described the discovery of the NYPD inside the New Jersey apartment, but police now have released the tape of the 911 call and other materials after a legal fight.

“There’s computer hardware, software, you know, just laying around,” the caller continued. “There’s pictures of terrorists. There’s pictures of our neighboring building that they have.”

“In New Brunswick?” the dispatcher asked, sounding as confused as the caller.

The AP requested a copy of the 911 tape last year. Under pressure from the NYPD, the New Brunswick Police Department refused. After the AP sued, the city this week turned over the tape and emails that described the NYPD’s efforts to keep the recording a secret.

The call sent New Brunswick police and the FBI rushing to the apartment complex. Officers and agents were surprised at what they found. None had been told that the NYPD was in town.

At the NYPD, the bungled operation was an embarrassment. It made the department look amateurish and forced it to ask the FBI to return the department’s materials.

The emails highlight the sometimes convoluted arguments the NYPD has used to justify its out-of-state activities, which have been criticized by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and some members of Congress. The NYPD has infiltrated and photographed Muslim businesses and mosques in New Jersey, monitored the Internet postings of Muslim college students across the Northeast and traveled as far away as New Orleans to infiltrate and build files on liberal advocacy groups.

In February, NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, Andrew Schaffer, told reporters that detectives can operate outside New York because they aren’t conducting official police duties.

“They’re not acting as police officers in other jurisdictions,” Schaffer said.

In trying to keep the 911 tape under wraps, however, the NYPD made no mention of the fact that its officers were not acting as police. In fact, Lt. Cmdr. William McGroarty and Assistant Chief Thomas Galati argued that releasing the recording would jeopardize investigations and endanger the people and buildings.

Further, the apartment, No. 1076, was rented by an undercover NYPD officer using a fake name that he was still using, New Brunswick attorneys told the AP.

“Such identification will place the safety of any officers identified, as well as the undercover operatives with whom they work, at risk,” Galati wrote in a letter to New Brunswick.

The city deleted that name from the copy of the tape that it released.

Reached by phone Tuesday, McGroarty declined to discuss the New Brunswick operation. But the recording offers a glimpse inside the safe house: a small apartment with two computers, dozens of black plastic boxes and no furniture or clothes except one suit.

“And pictures of our neighboring buildings?” the dispatcher asked.

“Yes, the Matrix building,” Sheth replied, referring to a local developer. “There’s pictures of terrorists. There’s literature on the Muslim religion.”

New York authorities have encouraged people like Sheth to call 911. In its “Eight Signs of Terrorism,” people are encouraged to call the police if they see evidence of surveillance, information gathering, suspicious activities or anything that looks out of place.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the police department’s right to go anywhere in the country in search of terrorists without telling local police. And New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa has said he’s seen no evidence that the NYPD’s efforts violated his state’s laws.

Muslim groups, however, have sued to shut down the NYPD programs. Civil rights lawyers have asked a federal judge to decide whether the spying violates federal rules that were set up to prevent a repeat of NYPD abuses of the 1950s, when police Red Squads spied on student groups and activists in search of communists.