N.Y.P.D. Muslim Surveillance Program Never Generated Leads - NYTimes.com: After the Associated Press disclosed the N.Y.P.D.’s Muslim surveillance program, the Times board editorialized against it from a civil liberties perspective. It seemed the police were spying on Muslims—sending plainclothes officers to monitor Muslims at mosques, on college campuses, taking photographs of Muslim-owned businesses, listening to conversations—with no “reason to think anything wrong was going on.” The board acknowledged that “under a federal court decree, it is permissible to collect information from public sources” but argued that “going to public places apparently selected on the basis of religion” was “another matter.”
Now it turns out the spying program is not only constitutionally suspect, but also ineffective. The A.P. reported today that in more than six years of spying on Muslims the police department’s so-called Demographics Unit “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”
