Check the bottom of your shoes next time you enter the classroom!
"NYPD tracked Muslims across Northeast" Associated Press, February 20, 2012
NEW YORK - The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, the Associated Press has learned.
Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in intelligence files how many times they prayed.
Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Asked about the monitoring, a police spokesman, Paul Browne, provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs.
Browne said police monitored student websites and collected publicly available information, but did so only between 2006 and 2007.
“I see a violation of civil rights here,’’ said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse. “Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy, and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has.’’
Though the NYPD says it follows the same rules as the FBI, some of the activities go beyond what the FBI is allowed to do. Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police follow only legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity. But the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.
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Related: NYPD Steps in Shi'ite
Can't you smell it?
