NYPD Monitored Muslim College Students' Activities

Muslim Student Association (MSA) 

Investigators have been infiltrating Muslim student groups at Brooklyn College and other schools in the city, monitoring their Internet activity and placing undercover agents in their ranks, police documents obtained by The Associated Press show. Legal experts say the operation may have broken a 19-year-old pact with the colleges and violated U.S. privacy laws, jeopardizing millions of dollars in federal research money and student aid.

The infiltration was part of a secret NYPD intelligence-gathering effort that put entire Muslim communities under scrutiny. Police photographed restaurants and grocery stores that cater to Muslims and built databases showing where people shopped, got their hair cut and prayed. The AP reported on the secret campaign in a series of stories beginning in August.

The majority of Islamic terrorism cases involve young men, and infiltrating student groups gave police access to that demographic. Alarmed professors and students, however, say it smacks of the FBI spying conducted on college campuses in the 1960s. They are calling on college administrators to investigate.

"It's really about personal freedom," said Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College. "The government, through the police department, is working privately to destroy the private lives of Muslim citizens."

....

In their surveillance, undercover officers from the department's Special Services Unit attended events organized by Muslim students, the official said, as did members of the NYPD's Demographics Unit, a secret squad that used plainclothes officers of Arab descent to monitor neighborhoods and events.

The NYPD's Cyber Intelligence Unit used speakers of Arabic, Persian and other languages to monitor the websites of Muslim student organizations. They trolled chat rooms and talked to students online, the official said.

By 2006, police had identified 31 Muslim student associations and labeled seven of them "MSAs of concern," the documents show.

Six were at branches of the City University of New York: Brooklyn College, Baruch College, City College, Hunter College, La Guardia Community College and Queens College. The other was at St. John's University, a Catholic college in the borough of Queens.

-npr

Seriously? CIA investigates whether laws broken helping NYPD

The CIA inspector general is investigating whether the agency broke the law by helping the New York Police Department build intelligence-gathering programs that monitored life in Muslim communities, the agency said Tuesday following an investigation by The Associated Press. Separately, the U.S. government's top intelligence official conceded that it looked bad for the CIA to be working with city police departments.


"It's my own personal view that that's not a good optic, to have CIA involved in any city-level police department," said James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence. "But I think CIA is going to address that."


The agency's unprecedented cooperation with the NYPD was a subject of an eight-month investigative reporting project by The Associated Press. The AP found that NYPD intelligence officers analyzed hundreds of mosques and student organizations, infiltrating dozens of them. Undercover officers eavesdropped in cafes and restaurants and wrote daily reports about what they overheard. The department also maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," the department labeled "ancestries of interest."


A CIA officer, Lawrence Sanchez, helped create and guide these programs. From 2002 to 2004, when these programs were being built, Sanchez was on the CIA payroll and maintained an office at both the NYPD and the CIA's offices in New York. The programs have continued with at least the tacit support of President Barack Obama, whose administration has repeatedly sidestepped questions about them.


The NYPD also sent a detective on a temporary assignment to the CIA, where he completed the agency's 17-week foreign espionage course. After that rare training, he then returned to New York to supervise intelligence investigations.


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