On March 11, a series of organizations released a report entitled “Mapping Muslims,” which traces the human impact of the NYPD”s illegal spying program targeting Muslims in and around New York City. The report, based on interviews with 57 members of Muslim communities in New York City, takes stock of the spying programs’ effects on religious practice, freedom of speech, social and community relations, law enforcement relationships and college campuses.
In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the NYPD, assisted by the CIA, was mapping and tracking Muslim residents and their businesses and places of worship through a secret squad, known as the “Demographics Unit.” However, the revelations of the AP failed to curtail the deeply racist and discriminatory pseudo-ethnographic project, which now goes by the euphemism, the “Zone Assessment Unit.”
The interviews conducted for the report make clear that the NYPD’s activities suppressed and chilled the practice of many Muslim’s faith. Individual interviewees observed:
It’s as if the law says: the more Muslim you are, the more trouble you can be, so decrease your Islam.
There are always parked, unmarked cars outside of mosques.
The impact on first amendment protected speech and community openness was found to be similarly chilling. According to Hamza, owner of a business monitored by the NYPD’s Demographics Unit:
I don’t allow Al-Jazeera on in our hookah bar. Particularly when things flare up in the Middle East. We can’t control what people start saying in response to the news, and we never know who else is in the bar listening.
(more…)
It’s been five years since Jim Scott embarked on his slog through the bureaucracy and secrecy of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in order to piece together why the government spied on his journalist father.
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