Mayor defends intelligence gathering

Associated Press

NEW YORK

New York’s mayor served notice Friday that his police department will do everything within its power to root out terrorists in the U.S., even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law- abiding Muslims under scrutiny.

“We just cannot let our guard down again,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned.

The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show after a week of criticism of a secret police-department effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student-groups at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Several college administrators and politicians have complained that the intelligence-gathering — exposed in a series of stories by The Associated Press — pried too deeply into the lives of innocent people.

With about 1,000 officers dedicated to intelligence and counterterrorism, the New York Police Department has one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence operations in the U.S. Its methods have stirred debate in legal circles over whether it has crossed the line and violated the civil liberties of Muslims.

In perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of some of the NYPD’s anti-terrorism efforts, Bloomberg said it is “legal,” “appropriate” and “constitutional” for police to keep a close eye on Muslim communities that terrorists might use as a base to strike the city. And he said investigators must pursue “leads and threats wherever they come from,” even across state lines.

“It would just be naive to think we should stop following threats when they get to the border,” Bloomberg said.

In the past few days, the department has come under fire from university officials and others, including the president of Yale University, after the AP revealed that police agents had monitored Muslim student groups around the Northeast and had sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip with some college students.

More criticism came from public officials in New Jersey after another AP report detailed a secret effort by the NYPD to photograph every mosque in Newark and catalog Muslim businesses.

That operation was an extension of a similar tracking effort within New York’s city limits. Plainclothes officers swept through Muslim neighborhoods, photographing mosques and eavesdropping on businesses. Informants reported on what they heard inside mosques, including the sermons. Police monitored and kept files on Muslims who Americanized their names. They also infiltrated Muslim student groups.

Critics have said it isn’t appropriate for the police to spy on citizens without reason to believe they committed a crime.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement Friday accusing the NYPD of turning the city into a “surveillance state.”

Faiza Patel, co-director of a civil rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, said guidelines in federal court rulings do not allow the department to hold on to files detailing the conversations of mosque worshippers “unless the information relates to potential terrorist or criminal activity.”

Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, questioned why the NYPD was assembling volumes of information on people who weren’t suspected of breaking any laws.

“It’s bad policing. It’s profiling, fishing expeditions. They’re looking around saying, ‘Surely in this community there must be bad people. If we look long enough, we’ll find them,’” Holt said.

Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, wrote an open letter Friday saying the NYPD shouldn’t have been monitoring the websites of Muslim student groups at the school unless one of them had been suspected of a crime. Bollinger said the government’s tactics could have a “chilling effect” on free speech and association.