NYPD Update: Stop-And-Frisk Now Under Federal Oversight; Muslim-Spying 'Demographics Unit' Disbanded

from the somewhere,-Mike-Bloomberg-is-choking-on-his-own-indignation dept

Time for an update on the NYPD scene. As you'll recall, both Mayor Bloomberg and Police Chief Ray Kelly exited their respective offices in their respective huffs, claiming the city would fall apart if the sanctity of the NYPD's Constitution-skirting programs (stop-and-frisk, the Muslim-watching Demographics Unit) weren't preserved.

The legal battle over the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk took several turns, including the removal of the presiding judge for "appearances of partiality." Incoming mayor Bill de Blasio promised to drop the city's appeal of Judge Scheindlin's ruling, and oddly enough, actually did.

An attempt to keep the appeal going was filed by the union representing the NYPD, but this was shot down by the appeals court. It did, however, allow it to be part of the final negotiations. The end result was the installation of five years of oversight over the NYPD's controversial program in order to move it towards something more resembling compliance with the Constitution.

The apocalypse Bloomberg and Kelly claimed was unavoidable if stop-and-frisk was curbed has failed to materialize. Even before the ruling was handed down, the program had been scaled back, with 86% fewer stops being recorded in the first quarter of 2014 than in the same quarter of 2012. Despite this lack of pushing random people up against the wall, crime is down 13% compared to 2013. Was stop-and-frisk ever truly essential? Or was it simply something that became an all too easily abused "tool" of the NYPD? At this point, the numbers seem to indicate that stop-and-frisk had very little real effect on criminal activity.

More good news on the NYPD v. Constitution front: the infamous Muslim-spying wing of the NYPD -- the stupidly-named "Demographics Unit" -- has been disbanded. This program, started by a former CIA officer who leveraged the city's post-9/11 anxieties to craft major changes to guidelines governing the surveillance of New Yorkers, spent a considerable amount of time infiltrating and surveilling entire mosques under the pretense that each and every member was somehow related to ongoing counterterrorism investigations.

The investigations performed by this unit did considerable damage to the civil liberties of mosque attendees over the last decade, but failed to turn up any credible suspects, much less terrorism-related arrests. The unit's pervasive surveillance so thoroughly violated First and Fourth Amendment protections that the CIA and FBI were unable to avail themselves of the "intelligence" collected by the NYPD without violating federal guidelines. When even the CIA can't look at your investigative results for fear of violating its own minimal civil liberties protections, you know you've got a problem.

Bill Bratton, returning to the NYPD commissioner's office, seems to have realized that programs like the Demographics Unit ultimately do more harm than good. When heading the Los Angeles Police Department, he was approached with a similar idea for tracking that city's Muslim community. He had this to say then:

“A lot of these people came from countries where the police were the terrorists,” he said at the time. “We don’t do that here. We do not want to spread fear. We want to deal with criminals.”

The NYPD, before his return, had no such concerns. If anything, the NYPD actively created distrust -- both in the New York Muslim community and around the world, sending its officers uninvited to peer over the shoulders of local police and investigative units at scenes of terrorism activity in countries like Kenya and Bali.

The new NYPD is still staffed with the old NYPD, which means change will be slow and likely fought every step of the way. Muslims are understandably concerned that the public disbandment of the Demographics Unit will just result in the level of surveillance being unchanged, if only a bit more unfocused. Bratton seems to be nudging the department towards a more FBI-esque set of rules, which isn't ideal, but is certainly much better than the abusive behavior permitted under the NYPD's internal guidelines.

It does appear the NYPD will be moving towards something resembling an actual police force, rather than a law unto itself. Without Kelly and Bloomberg around to defend its every overstep, the NYPD can no longer expect to skirt the Constitution with impunity. But there's a long way to go to fix things, so any optimism must be tempered by the fact that good habits are tough to instill and bad habits are extremely hard to break. Five years of oversight is a start, but the city -- meaning the mayor and the police commissioner -- must be willing to hold its officers accountable.

Filed Under: demographics unit, nyc, nypd, profiling, stop and frisk

Homeland Security Is An Embarassment With The Way It Treats US Citizens At The Border

from the this-needs-to-stop dept

A few months back, we wrote about the horrific treatment by Homeland Security's Customs and Border Patrol agents of On the Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and her friends and family at the border. They were all US citizens and yet were detained for many hours for no reason, had their electronics seized and were generally treated terribly. Homeland Security has refused to explain why it stopped them -- though, the obvious answer is that they were Muslim. There is now a similar story from Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, the Emmy-nominated producer and host of Huffpost Live (full disclosure: he once had me on his show), discussing how he gets detained every time he returns to the country. This time, he was just coming back from the World Economic Forum at Davos, and he was given a document with a big X over his face and sent to a "special" line: As he notes, the room was... full of "brown" people:

At the door, an Egyptian-American woman greeted me, "Al Salaam Aleykum," she said. I reluctantly responded "Wa Aleykum Al Salam," though I was hardly feeling at peace. The room was filled with rows of seats and several DHS officers with colorful folders (red, yellow, green, blue) lined up in front of them with passports and travel documents. The juxtaposition of the colorful folders with the rows of mostly brown people filling the seats was suspect in itself.

"Omar Mubarak... Juan Diaz... Sayed Hussain," the officers called us one by one.

I couldn't help but feel as though JFK itself was a bit racist.

And, just as Sarah and her family and friends discovered, despite being US citizens, DHS treats them all like criminals:

After a 14-hour trip, I wanted to stretch my legs. So I stood up, anxious to find myself back in the room, especially after having written to the DHS. "Take a seat," the officer at the door sternly said to me. I told him I wanted to stretch my legs after the long flight. He told me I wasn't allowed to stand up. You are also not allowed to use your phone or electronic equipment. I was also slightly surprised to find as many children in the room as there were cameras.

"Sir, I'm a U.S. citizen who wants to stand while being detained. Am I not allowed to stand?" I said, pointing to the Asian man and Pakistani woman standing with their toddler strapped to the man's chest. Anyway, there were only two empty seats in the room with a capacity of 60.

"Sit down!" he repeated for the sixth time, and came and confiscated my phone, which I was using to try to text my coworkers who were waiting to share a car home.

Like Sarah, DHS won't provide any information as to why he was detained. And it clearly wasn't random, seeing as this is the third time in a row it has happened. While he has applied to have his name removed from the list, as we noted with the lawsuit involving Rahinah Ibrahim, DHS seems to have no interest in correcting its mistakes until forced to do so.

Frankly, this is disgusting. It's sickening that we are treating American citizens this way as they attempt to return home. Homeland Security and the US government seem to have dropped all pretense of freedom if you happen to be brown, Muslim or have an Arabic name (and just imagine those who hit on all three). This is not what this country is supposed to stand for -- and the fact that we now have two very similar stories from prominent journalists, and DHS continues to respond by saying absolutely nothing, is even more disgusting. With On the Media, they've been trying to pressure Congress to investigate the matter, but to date, no one in Congress seems to want to take on this issue, which is a real shame.

Filed Under: ahmed shihab-eldin, customs and border patrol, detention, homeland security, profiling, sarah abdurrahman, us citizens

NYPD Program Designated Entire Mosques As 'Terrorist Organizations' And Failed To Deliver Useful Data When It Mattered Most

from the an-ongoing,-audacious-failure dept

The NYPD's defenders claim that minorities will be the real victims if the stop and frisk program is neutered by court decisions and legislation. It's an odd claim considering minorities made up 88% of the unconstitutional stops, but that's the line of thinking up top.

I wonder how they'll spin this latest revelation. The NYPD carved itself exceptions to policies meant to limit First Amendment violations by declaring entire New York mosques as "terror groups."

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprises.

How did the NYPD do this? By exploiting post-9/11 paranoia and leveraging the word "protection" in order to infringe on civil liberties. NY Magazine details how this went down in a very long and thorough writeup on the history of the NYPD's civil liberty-stomping Demographics Group. The first step in turning mosques into Constitution-free zones required a rewrite of rules referred to as the "Handschu guidelines."

"The guidelines stated that police could investigate constitutionally protected activities only when they had specific information that a crime was being committed or was imminent. Undercover officers could be used only when they were essential to a case, not as a way to keep tabs on groups that might be up to no good. Police were prohibited from building dossiers on people or keeping their names in files without specific evidence of crimes."

Over the years, constitutional protection has often been viewed as an impediment to investigative work. Just as the government pushed for warrantless wiretaps, location tracking and cell phone content searches, the NYPD pushed for uncontrolled access to anything it considered a hotspot for terrorists -- in this case, the city's many mosques. The bizarrely-named "Demographics Group" used the recent terrorist attacks in New York City as the justification for violating First Amendment protections.

[T]he activities that [CIA liaison Larry] Sanchez and [former senior CIA officer David] Cohen were proposing would not have been permitted under the Handschu guidelines. So, on September 12, 2002, Cohen filed a 23-page document in federal court asking a judge to throw out the guidelines and give his officers more leeway.

Cohen insisted that the world had changed since Al Qaeda attacked America, and the NYPD needed to change with it. “These changes were not envisioned when the Handschu guidelines were agreed upon,” he wrote, “and their continuation dangerously limits the ability of the NYPD to protect the people it is sworn to serve.”

Cohen painted a frightening picture of a nation—and a city—under siege from enemies within. “They escape detection by blending into American society. They may own homes, live in communities with families, belong to religious or social organizations, and attend educational institutions,” he wrote. “They typically display enormous patience, often waiting years until the components of their plans are perfectly aligned.”

He argued that America’s freedoms of movement, privacy, and association gave terrorists an advantage, one that left U.S. citizens painfully exposed. “The freedom of our society,” Cohen wrote, “has also made it possible for terrorist organizations to maintain U.S.-based activities.”

This 23-page document was, to put it lightly, bullshit. But it was a "masterpiece" of button-pushing, an exceedingly well-crafted bit of rhetoric that served as a justification blueprint for nearly every constitutionally-problematic NYPD program that followed. Cohen's combination of jargon and fearmongering won over Judge Charles Haight, who decided the "Handschu guidelines" were no longer applicable to today's terrorist-heavy world.

The new guidelines still contained one significant restriction: the department was forbidden from collecting or storing information related to First Amendment-protected activities (like worship and speech) unless it was "directly related" to criminal activity. This limitation obviously wasn't going to work for Sanchez and Cohen, so they did what the NSA has done -- expanded the definition of "related." Here's a quote by Sanchez that illustrates the type of spin deployed to loosen the restrictions.

“Part of our mission is to protect New York City citizens from becoming terrorists."

This is taken from a statement delivered to Congress. Unbelievably, no one questioned whether the NYPD should really be in the "business" of "protecting" New Yorkers from terrorist recruiting efforts. No one questioned the fact that widening the scope of its "mission" allowed the NYPD's mini-CIA to claim nearly everything and everyone in New York City was "related" to its investigations, thanks to nearly everyone being somehow susceptible to terrorist recruitment efforts. In fact, as NY Magazine points out, Congress "enthusiastically embraced" Cohen and Sanchez's views.

With anything and everything now "related" to the Demographic Group's investigations, the data poured in. And most of what was collected was completely useless. Well, "useless" if you believe the group was primarily there to catch terrorists. If you believe it was there to scoop up as much information as it could about mosque attendees and their non-mosque-related activities, then the program was firing on all cylinders.

About once a week, they filed reports on conversations they’d eavesdropped on. Nobody trained the rakers on what exactly qualified as suspicious, so they reported anything they heard. One Muslim man made it into files even though he praised President Bush’s State of the Union address and said people who criticized the U.S. government didn’t realize how good they had it. Two men of Pakistani ancestry were included for saying the nation’s policies had become increasingly anti-Muslim since 9/11. Muslims who criticized the CIA’s use of drones to launch missiles in Pakistan were documented.

The surveillance program grew, as unchecked programs tend to, expanding beyond even the loosely-defined targets.

Cohen and Sanchez’s efforts also reached beyond the Muslim community. Undercover officers traveled the country, keeping tabs on liberal protest groups like Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will. Police infiltrated demonstrations and collected information about antiwar groups and those that marched against police brutality.

So, now the Demographic Group was surveilling everyone the NYPD viewed with suspicion, including those who simply don't care to be brutalized by police officers. This program extended so far past its original point that even the FBI became concerned after Sanchez tried to sell it some of the Demographics Group's collected data, declaring the program was "targeting individuals and businesses without cause." Taking the files would have violated the FBI's rules.

Not only was the FBI concerned, but the CIA found the unit's work troublesome, especially as no one could point to any proven results of its activities.

Sitting with the NYPD, [senior CIA officer Margaret Henoch] felt a similar unease. She didn’t see how the Demographics reports could be used to draw conclusions. “I think this is a really impressive collection of what’s where, but I don’t understand how it helps you,” Henoch told the NYPD brass… She asked if there was some success story that summed up the program’s usefulness in its first two years. When she didn’t get an answer, she assumed that the NYPD was being coy with a potential rival. Even in the post-9/11 era, intelligence agencies often jealously guarded their secrets.

We've covered that exact lack of results here at Techdirt. Thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars spent, and the only success stories seem to involve questionable sting operations that set up unassuming chumps to take a fall on terrorism charges. The only outcome to date has been an impressive slate of civil liberties violations.

Even worse, despite years of wide collections, no one who ended up in a file was ever crossed off the list of potential terrorists. If the Demographic Group gathered anything on you, you were a suspect for life. The analogy Cohen used to sell the judge on the program -- "raking" through "coal" to look for "hotspots" -- turned out be a shovel that produced nothing more than bigger and bigger piles of coal.

Then came the most damning moment of all. The collection efforts failed when they mattered most.

In September 2009, the National Security Agency intercepted an e-mail from a taxi driver named Najibullah Zazi to an e-mail address linked to one of Al Qaeda’s most senior leaders. The message contained the line “the marriage is ready.”

Marriage and wedding were among Al Qaeda’s favorite code words for attacks, referring to the day that a suicide bomber met his brides, the maidens of the hereafter.

Trying to ascertain the scope of the plot, the NYPD searched the files of the Demographics Unit. Even though the rakers had canvassed Zazi’s neighborhood daily, and had even visited the travel agent where he bought his tickets between New York and Colorado, there was not a single piece of useful information.

Here's where the NYPD's mini-CIA meets the real CIA and its more secretive, more sinister big brother, the NSA. All of these agencies, handling rakes or pitchforks or whatever in order to comb through haystacks and piles of coal, collaborated to search for that one ember, that one needle -- and came up with nothing.

Harvesting massive amounts of data simply because you've carved yourself a loophole in the Constitution not only abuses the trust of American citizens, but it does so in exchange for "collections" that are 99.9-100% useless. The defenders continue to claim every bit of this extraneous information is somehow "relevant" or "related," but when it comes time to put it all to work, the dots fail to connect. See also: the Boston Bombing.

Kelly still believes this program is useful and violates no one's rights. Of course he feels this way. Citizens are merely data points or potential criminals or, very frequently, both. The only people he trusts are members of his police force. Everyone else is a name on a file, collected and observed simply because someone gave the NYPD the permission to do it.

Filed Under: investigations, mosques, nypd, privacy, profiling, terrorism

NYPD Spent Years Spying On Muslims, Generated Exactly Zero Leads

from the security-theater dept

We just wrote about yet another (in a long line) of manufactured terrorist plots, in which the FBI creates its own terrorist plot to arrest anyone who can be coaxed into going along for the ride, even if they had no interest or ability to push the plot forward on their own. In that case, it was even more ridiculous, because they couldn't even find anyone willing to go along with the plot -- and the main "suspect" actually alerted the FBI to the informant who was trying to coax him into taking part in a plot (which didn't stop him from being arrested, even if the case was eventually dropped).

Of course, the FBI is not alone in its incredibly ham-fisted anti-terrorism efforts in which the focus seems to be much more about someone's religious leanings, rather than any actual interest in creating terror. The NY Police Department got plenty of attention for deciding to build their own local versions of the FBI and CIA to try to catch terrorists. That link describes the NYPD as a sort of new "elite" intelligence agency, hiring people out of other intelligence agencies and then placing agents around the globe to try to beat the FBI and CIA at their own game.

Back at home, apparently this included following on the FBI's tactic of assuming that "brown skin = terrorist." As such, they've spent the past few years spying on "Muslim neighbrhoods" throughout New York (with help from the CIA), sending undercover agents and informants into Muslim groups and organizations:

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism. And if police ever got a tip about, say, an Afghan terrorist in the city, they'd know where he was likely to rent a room, buy groceries and watch sports.

How useful has it been? Apparently not at all. Not a single lead has come out of the program. Not one.

I know this is a crazy thought, but perhaps violating the privacy of tons of people just because of the color of their skin or their religion, isn't the best (or even "a") way to stop terrorists.

Filed Under: civil liberties, muslims, new york city, nyc, privacy, profiling, spying, terrorism

FBI-Created 'Terrorist Plot' Fails To Produce A Single Terrorist -- But Does Plenty Of Damage To Individual Liberties

from the sacrificing-your-1st-and-4th-amendment-rights-on-the-altar-of-security dept

As the FBI continues its perfect streak of successfully thwarting every terrorist plan it has conceived and put in motion itself (a few of which have been covered here), details of an unintentionally hilarious (and particularly horrendous) "terrorist plot" conjured up back in 2006 have emerged, thanks to an NPR expose and a lawsuit filed against the FBI by some of the unwilling participants.

Dubbed "Operation Flex" in deference to its main participant, this 2006 FBI project attempted to uncover a terrorist cell in a group of Orange County Muslims, even if it had to invent that cell itself. The FBI's man on the inside was Craig Montielh, who likely cut an incongruous figure at the mosque at 6'2", 260 lbs... and white. A bodybuilder with a sketchy past, Montielh was instructed to make contact with the supposed jihadists during his frequent visits to an Irvine gym where many of the Muslim men worked out.

To Montielh's credit, he sunk himself into the role. His FBI contacts suspected his new friends might be a terrorist cell because, well, they were four, unmarried Egyptian men living under one roof. But his enthusiasm for the job was constantly thwarted by his "targets," who preferred playing FIFA Soccer on the Xbox to discussing terrorist plots.

At first, they treated Montielh (who was going by the name "Farouk") as one of them, a new acolyte in need of guidance. But as time went on and Montielh became desperate to show results, his desire to turn idle revolutionary chat into action began to worry his companions. Montielh's first move was to amp up his personal relationship with Allah.

Months passed. People noticed that Craig was acting more devout. He began reciting prayers aloud, dressing in traditional robes, and showing up so early for 5:00 AM prayers that he'd get there before the person who unlocked the mosque every morning. They also noticed something else.

Yassir Abdel Rahim - Slowly and surely enough, during some times when we were having coffee, came the question of jihad.

Craig talked to his Arabic teacher, Mohammad Elsisy, about his new obsession too.

Mohammad Elsisy - He invited me once to lunch, yes. And he focused the topic in the lunch about jihad. And I keep turning his attention into the essence of Islam. And he keeps, again, bringing it back to jihad. And he kept asking about jihad over and over and over. And I told him, Farouk, get over it, get over it, get over it.

With Montielh trying and failing repeatedly to get these California Muslims to warm up to his own personal jihad, the FBI decided it was time for phase two. Montielh was told to start talking up an actual terrorist plot to blow up buildings in Southern California. After Montielh aggressively broached the subject to his friends during a car ride, they decided to do what anyone would have done in that situation:

After they parted ways with Craig, Mohammad and Niazi talked about what had just happened. They decided they had to do something, so they did what all Americans are supposed to do in this situation, what law enforcement officials tell us we should do when someone says he has access to weapons and wants to use them. They reported Craig to the FBI as a potential terrorist.

Mohammed and Niazi had Hussam Ayloush, the director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, make the call for them. He spoke to Steve Tidwell, the head of the FBI's California branch. Tidwell didn't even ask for a name or last known address of this white Muslim terrorist and assured Hussam that the FBI would take it from here. And the FBI did, launching what, for all intents and purposes, looked like an actual terrorist investigation.

But instead of wholeheartedly pursuing its own man, the FBI agents were more interested in repeatedly questioning everyone Montielh had talked to. They honed in on Niazi, whose sister was married to Amin al-Haq, designated as a terrorist by the US government. The FBI agents used this as leverage in an attempt to get Niazi to become a paid informant and go to work for them in Afghanistan. When he refused, the FBI had him arrested for "immigration fraud and making false statements."

But what's interesting about Niazi's arrest is what he wasn't charged with. He wasn't charged with associating with terrorists himself. He wasn't charged with plotting an attack. And he wasn't charged for anything he'd ever said to Craig over the course of months of recorded conversations.

At Niazi's trial, Agent Thomas Ropel repeatedly told the prosecutor that Niazi had instigated the conversations related to the so-called "terrorist plot." This isn't the way Montielh (or his tapes) remembers it:

Sam Black - Did Niazi ever instigate this kind of conversation with you?

Craig Montielh - No. No, I did. Every time.

Despite not being charged with anything more serious than immigration fraud and "making false statements," Niazi was placed under house arrest for more than a year. He represents all of the arrests or indictments made as a result of Operation Flex. And even this didn't stick. The US government filed a motion to dismiss all charges against Niazi.

Another home-built terrorist operation and not even a single conviction to show for it. In fact, the FBI is arguably worse off now than if it had never begun the investigation. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has brought a lawsuit against FBI over Operation Flex, claiming the investigation violated their First Amendment rights by targeting them for their religious beliefs, as well as subjecting them to searches and monitoring without a warrant. The botched operation has also done damage to the Muslim community in California:

Operation Flex didn't just make people suspicious of law enforcement. It made them suspicious of each other. So many people I talked to say they stay away from new converts now. They have a hard time believing people are who they say they are. Here's Ayman, the Egyptian guy who first befriended Craig.

Ayman - Really, what they did is they made everybody in the mosque not trust everybody. Nobody would talk about it, but nobody-- you would see some weird looks, you know what I mean? People are looking at each other weird. I don't know. Maybe I was sensitive, but I can tell that the way they looked at me was just different.

In addition to making themselves look like a bunch of government agents creating their own busywork to stay employed, the FBI has taken yet another serious hit to its credibility. Early on in the transcript, it's noted that Stephen Tidwell (head of the FBI in Los Angeles) made an earlier approach via a town meeting at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He assured everyone attending that the FBI was not monitoring the mosque and that they would be informed if anyone from the FBI was planning to visit. That was June 5, 2006. Operation Flex began roughly two months later.

Then there's this troubling statistic, courtesy of investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, who's studied hundreds of terrorism convictions:

Of about 500 terrorism cases since 9/11, about 50 defendants have been involved in cases where the informant came up with the idea and provided all of the means.

Finally, the worst, but least surprising, news of all: in an update to the story, NPR points out that US District Judge Cormac Carney has dismissed the lawsuit brought by CAIR, stating that allowing the the suit to proceed would "significantly compromise national security."

Carney's self-serving statement casts him (and a large part of the government's various secretive services) as an ancient Greek hero:

In struggling with this conflict, the Court is reminded of the classic dilemma of Odysseus, who faced the challenge of navigating his ship through a dangerous passage, flanked by a voracious six-headed monster, on the one side, and a deadly whirlpool, on the other. Odysseus opted to pass by the monster and risk a few of his individual sailors, rather than hazard the loss of his entire ship to the sucking whirlpool. Similarly, the proper application of the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security.

I know the Greeks laid the foundation for modern democracy, but perhaps we shouldn't base our decisions on their epic tragedies.

Filed Under: fbi, informants, muslims, privacy, profiling, terrorism