From Los Angeles Times
New York Muslims have filed a federal lawsuit against the New York Police Department over the department’s surveillance of Muslims, which they called invasive and unconstitutional.
The public debate over government surveillance has crescendoed over the last two weeks after a leaker revealed that the federal government had secretly collected detailed phone records, on a massive scale, for years.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday emerged from a narrower but similar channel of criticism over the growth of surveillance on citizens since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The suit also illustrated the power of the press to bring secret programs not just to light, but also to court.
Over a series of stories in 2011 and 2012, Associated Press reporters exposed a secret, long-running NYPD program to monitor Muslims across the Northeast using informants and databases in the hopes of spotting radicals.
Once made aware of the program, Muslim groups and civil liberties advocates were outraged, though a Pulitzer for the AP’s stories notwithstanding, city and police officials persisted in defending the spying as necessary to combat terrorism.
As recently as Monday, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kellywent so far as to criticize the National Security Agency for not owning up to its monitoring programs, telling reporters, “I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone, it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government.”
