New York
Lawyers seek docs on NYPD unit that eyed Muslims
Civil rights attorneys investigate the controversial surveillance program
In this photo taken Sept. 2, 2011, worshippers are pictured inside the Al-Iman Mosque after midday prayers in the Astoria neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. (Credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) Civil rights lawyers asked a federal judge Monday to force the New York Police Department to turn over documents about its secret efforts to spy on and infiltrate the Muslim community.
The request, filed in federal court in Manhattan, is based on reporting by The Associated Press, which revealed a clandestine police unit that monitored all aspects of daily life in Muslim neighborhoods. Documents showed that plainclothes officers were being dispatched to eavesdrop inside businesses. Restaurants that serve Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated. Dozens were infiltrated.
Police also maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with “American Black Muslim,” were labeled “ancestries of interest.”
“Based on this evidence, there is reason to believe that the NYPD retains records of surveillance of public places that are not limited to information pertaining to ‘potential unlawful activity or terrorism,’” lawyers told U.S. District Judge Charles Haight.
A spokesman for the New York Police Department didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The documents were filed as part of a decades-old, class-action lawsuit against the NYPD for spying on war protesters and activists. Since 1985, a court order has limited how the department can monitor activities protected by the First Amendment. Police are not allowed to collect and store information about innocent people that is not related to criminal or terrorist activity.
“The (AP) articles, as well as NYPD documents that have been published in conjunction with them, strongly suggest that the NYPD retains such records as a matter of policy,” wrote lawyer Jethro M. Einstein, the lead lawyer in the case.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne has said police only follow leads and do not trawl neighborhoods. Documents obtained by the AP, however, show a secret team known as the Demographics Unit was instructed to canvass neighborhoods looking for businesses catering to one ethnic group, Moroccans. The documents indicated plans to build databases for other ethnic groups showing where they eat, work, pray and shop.
Current and former officials said those databases made some working in the police department uncomfortable, including in-house lawyer Stuart Parker. Because of those concerns, they said, the Demographics Unit stored its information on a special computer not connected to the department’s normal intelligence database. Lawyers asked Haight to order police not to delete any of those materials.
Haight did not immediately rule on the request.
Mayor Bloomberg’s army
The mayor of New York and his police commissioner reveal just how comfortable they are with autocracy
Michael Bloomberg (Credit: AP/Richard Drew) Billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his own army! No, it’s not a private security firm, like Blackwater. It’s actually, according to the mayor, the New York City Police Department.
Bloomberg, again threatening vaguely to make that presidential run that the American people are decidedly not calling for, told MIT last night that he doesn’t even need to be president, because all of his autocratic desires are fulfilled by running America’s most populous city as his private fiefdom.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
“Al-Qaida sympathizer” accused of NYC bomb plots
The 27-year-old suspect, Jose Pimental, is described as a "lone wolf," not part of a larger conspiracy
Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks to the media at a City Hall press conference, Sunday, Nov. 20, 2011, in New York. (Credit: AP/Louis Lanzano) NEW YORK (AP) — An “al-Qaida sympathizer” accused of plotting to bomb police and post offices in New York City as well as U.S. troops returning home remained in police custody after an arraignment on numerous terrorism-related charges.
Jose Pimentel of Manhattan was described by Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a Sunday news conference announcing Pimentel’s arrest as “a 27-year-old al-Qaida sympathizer” who was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said police had to move quickly to arrest Pimentel on Saturday because he was ready to carry out his plan.
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If policing Occupy Wall Street is too expensive, why not save money by not illegally spying on Muslims?
Police escort Occupy Wall Street protesters marching in New York on Wednesday. (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig) When the NYPD arrested hundreds of people participating in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration last weekend, in an echo of their illegal arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention, the movement actually grew in size and scope, with thousands of people today participating and more to join later this week. The usual “sweep the hippies into jail because no one cares” strategy did not really work, this time. So here’s the next tactic, which I imagine you’ll be seeing in the Post (and probably the Daily News!) soon: The city will have to move against Occupy Wall Street because it’s too expensive to allow them to continue.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
Mayor Bloomberg, partner diagnose what's wrong with America: You
New York's elite ask that regular folk please be more respectful of their betters (and stop protesting them)
New York's First Couple(Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts) The 90,000 New Yorkers who control 99% of the city’s wealth are completely segregated, geographically and intellectually, from everyone else in the city and the nation at large, so its no surprise that they tend to be tone-deaf and blind to the inequities and frustrations and resentments of Regular Folk, but billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his charming and powerful partner Diana Taylor are really out-doing themselves in terms of blinkered elite thickheadedness these days.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
“Margaret”: The great NYC post-9/11 movie that crashed and burned
Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed follow-up to "You Can Count on Me" is a fascinating, half-brilliant disaster
Anna Paquin in "Margaret" Kenneth Lonergan’s film “Margaret” took so long to make that two of its producers died before it was finished. I’m not trying to be witty, just reporting the facts: In the opening credits, Anthony Minghella is listed as a producer of “Margaret” and Sydney Pollack as an executive producer. Both of those eminent filmmakers have been dead for more than three years. When a high school student complains, early in the film, that she doesn’t think much of the current president, you’re tempted to wonder whom she’s thinking about. Jimmy Carter? Ike? William Howard Taft?
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