NEW YORK – A secret New York Police Department program to spy on Muslim businesses, infiltrate mosques and monitor Muslim students on college campuses has ignited a debate over how to strike a balance between civil liberties and national security. The NYPD has vigorously defended the tactics, calling them legal and necessary.
Here’s a look, in question-and-answer format, of the key legal and policy issues at play.
Q: What does it mean that police were “spying”?’
A: Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A secret squad known as the Demographics Unit deployed plainclothes officers, typically of Arab descent, into Muslim neighborhoods to photograph mosques and catalog everywhere that Muslims congregate, including restaurants, grocery stores, Internet cafes and travel agencies. The officers eavesdropped inside businesses and filed daily reports on the ethnicity of the owner and clientele and what they overheard. The program was not based on allegations of criminal activity and did not stop at the city line.
The goal was to have complete understanding of the Muslim communities in and around New York, to identify problem areas and prevent attacks.
Police also infiltrated Muslim student organizations and monitored the websites of Muslim student groups. Officers included names of students and professors in police files, even when there were no allegations of criminal wrongdoing. Some of the city’s Muslim allies, those who stood beside Mayor Michael Bloomberg and decried terrorism, were being monitored by the NYPD.
Police kept files on Muslims in New York who changed their names to names that sounded more typically American. Similarly, anyone who took on a new, Arabic-sounding name was catalogued.
