NYPD denies \'terrorism files\' kept on Muslim students

Yale University and student groups are condemning the monitoring of Muslim students across America's Northeast by the recent York Police Department, while Rutgers University and leaders of Muslim groups are calling for investigations.

The hot York Police Department monitored Muslim students rather more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond town limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press reported Saturday.

Police talked with local authorities about professors 480 kilometres away in Buffalo and sent an secret agent on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate Ny, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files what number times they prayed.

Detectives trawled Muslim student websites daily and, although professors and scholars had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

A 2006 report explained that officers from the NYPD's Cyber Intelligence unit visited the internet sites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a "daily routine."

The schools included Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; Big apple University; Clarkson University; Rutgers University; and the State University of recent York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College, and La Guardia Community College.

An NYPD spokesman said police desired to get a stronger handle on what was occurring at student associations. He cited 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges inside the U . s . a . and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said police monitored student websites and picked up publicly available information, but did so only between 2006 and 2007.

"Students who advertised events or sent emails about regular events shouldn't be worried a few 'terrorism file' being kept on them. NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe may well be desirous about unlawful activities," Browne said.

Yale President Richard Levin said the university's police department failed to take part in any monitoring by NYPD and was blind to it.

"i'm writing to state, within the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance in accordance with religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political affairs is antithetical to the values of Yale, the tutorial community, and the u. s. ," Levin said in an announcement.

The Connecticut chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and native officials to analyze to ascertain the level of the monitoring and the way to avoid it from happening again.

"They're just going out and casting a large net around an entire community, so they're criminalising in a means an entire community in accordance with their religion," said Mongi Dhaouadi, director of CAIR in Connecticut.

A message left with Malloy's spokesman seeking comment wasn't immediately returned.

Rutgers University in New Jersey called for the NYPD to enquire its own activities. The Muslim Student Association at Rutgers called the monitoring a contravention of civil rights.

"The Rutgers populace should openly condemn the clear violations of the NYPD, who conducted illegitimate profiling outside in their jurisdiction and breached the constitutional rights of anyone," the Rutgers student group said in an announcement.

The Association of Muslim American Lawyers called for the hot York attorney general to enquire.

The Muslim Students Association of the us and Canada expressed concerns in addition.

"MSA National has always been an organisation willing to work alongside law enforcement agencies to assist keep our communities safe," President Zahir Latheef said.

"However, we believe that the NYPD clearly overstepped its boundaries when it all started spying on average American Muslim students who were simply taking whitewater rafting trips or innocently participating in class activities at their college or university campus."

The Muslim Students Association of the University at Buffalo said it felt discriminated against "by this secret investigation conducted by a police agency 400 miles away."

The scholar monitoring was portion of a miles larger intelligence operation that has put entire Muslim neighborhoods under scrutiny. The NYPD built databases showing where Muslims lived, worked, shopped and prayed. Plainclothes officers called "rakers" eavesdropped in cafes and informants referred to as "mosque crawlers" reported on weekly sermons.

Because the AP began reporting on these programmes in August, civil liberties groups and nearly three dozen members of Congress have called for the Justice Department to enquire. The recent York attorney general has also been asked to seem into it.

But requires an inquiry have thus far yielded little. The NYPD's intelligence unit operates in secret. Even the town Council, which funds the dep., isn't told about police intelligence operations. And though the NYPD receives hundreds of millions of greenbacks in federal money, the Obama administration has repeatedly sidestepped questions on whether it endorses the NYPD's tactics.

-AP