NYPD monitored where Muslims ate, shopped, prayed

Welcome to the Soviet States of America. Just what we need. Not infiltration of criminal orgs, but infiltration of minority life.

When the CIA would launch drone attacks in Pakistan, the NYPD would dispatch rakers to Pakistani neighborhoods to listen for angry rhetoric and anti-American comments, current and former officials involved in the program said.

I bet they have a dossier on me then too. Ain't much more cowardly than killing people by remote control.

It makes me sad that this is what my supposedly "free" and "liberty-loving" country has come to.

Sad just sad.

Where are the liberties and freedoms in the USA?

I would have guessed that the NYPD had better spend their time on crime-fighting, gangs, drugs, etc.

Wow, I don't think I've read an article this poorly written in quite some time.

How so?

The same people here crying about human rights etc..see what the victims of September 11 would say to you all. If you have no crime to hide fine, if you are planning to do evil with Alqaeda, well Guantanamo is waiting for you.

Political groups get monitored and islam is a political movement as much as a religion. I just can't get worked up over this.

Just a fact that I want to point out. I see a comment by Super Lib:

Wow, I don't think I've read an article this poorly written in quite some time.

And HumanTarget replies:

How so?

And so far I see rating +1 to SuperLib and -1 to HumanTarget. Put the +1 aside, can anyone explain to me the reason to rate a comment that asks for a clarification negatively. It just shows just how "open-minded" are the people who follow the propaganda blindly against a thread of fictional enemies (first the soviet headache, now Islamophobia).

@Lieberman2012

Political groups get monitored and islam is a political movement as much as a religion. I just can't get worked up over this.

Then where are the numbers on monitoring AIPAC? (or that doesn't bother you either)

Mulims pose a threat to security in the states and many other countries, if the govenment wasnt proactive in doing anything to protect the people then there would be an outcry.

Islam has a image problem in the west, the radical nut jobs are responsible for the perception many in the west have of muslims.

The govt must protect it citizens, soemtimes what it does will be perceived to be wrong, but the end goal is protection of its people. Understand that.

They are damned if they do and damned if they dont.

ExportExpertSep. 01, 2011 - 12:53PM JST

if the govenment wasnt proactive in doing anything to protect the people then there would be an outcry.

There are limits to being pro-active. Investigating people for statements that are not direct threats is a clear affront to the freedom of speech.

If there is an outcry from people who want this sort of surveillance, let them cry. They can move to a country using this sort of Gestapo tactic. No reason it has to be the U.S. But even countries who get regular terror attacks don't do this, nor should they.

oracle

Welcome to the Soviet States of America. Just what we need. Not infiltration of criminal orgs, but infiltration of minority life.

So much melodrama. It was worse under FDR and Wilson.

So much melodrama. It was worse under FDR and Wilson.

I would not know. Does not make it any less despicable, so I feel completely justified in my description.

This annoys me greatly:

Ain't much more cowardly than killing people by remote control.

Ridiculous. Simply ridiculous. Are you suggesting we don't take advantage of our technological superiority? If drone strikes are cowardly, I guess wearing body armor must also be cowardly. Better make our troops stop wearing body armor then. While we're at it, I guess we should be issuing beat up, 40 year old AK-47's to our troops - wouldn't want to give them an unfair advantage, huh?

Why didnt they hire those former STASI professional to do these dirty jobs? The CIA was just a laugh stock in world intelligence communities. They have been fooled by the Pakistani for 9 years in hunting OBL and still has got to work with them!

"There were those who, during World War II, said, `Good, I’m glad they’re interning all the Japanese-Americans who are living here,’” Clarke said. “But we look back on that period with disdain.”

One thing’s for damn sure: They should stop sending all those Islamic-Americans to internment camps.

Here's my guess at what the real situation is. The squad has 16 people. It said they speak at least 5 languages. My guess is that they aren't sending Italian-Americans to Pakistani neighborhoods to "chat up" local business owners. And the white, Irish-American cop probably isn't being sent to clubs to "eavesdrop" on local Muslims after he plays a game of cricket with them. What you probably have are mostly Arab/Muslim cops from the local community being told to report suspicious information to a centralized place. They are the ones going to the clubs, coffee shops, and seeing mosque information boards.

The AP probably has some good research on it, but in the end it probably isn't all that sexy or alarming. So they decided to take the information, drop bits and pieces here and there, withhold other parts, then let your imaginations run wild. They know people will fill in the blanks with "Gestapo" comments.

One example (out of about a dozen in the article): "The AP independently authenticated the NYPD presentation through an interview with an official who sat through it and by reviewing electronic data embedded in the file. A former official who had not seen the presentation said the content of the presentation was correct."

I don't understand how they can say there was a presentation that someone sat through and not just give us the exact details of the presentation from beginning to end. Either they know the information and it's not that sexy so they say nothing, or there was no presentation. Probably the former. Then they bring up some kind of "electronic data embedded in the file" but I can guarantee that not a single person here can tell me exactly what that means. If I'm wrong, please speak up and let us all know what that collection of buzzwords amounts to. And finally they tell us that someone else who was not there verified that it happened. It's almost as if the writer needed to add more sentences to the paragraph without actually telling us specifics about the presentation so he just made some stuff up. I used to do that in high school sometimes on my papers when I needed a few extra filler sentences.

The beginning of the article says the AP has documents detailing the work by the department. Great. Then give us the information. It seems that everything they were able to verify were from "former officials" who don't seem to have any problem saying there is a department but never seem to get around to giving any specifics about it. It makes you wonder what "documents" the AP really has since they obviously don't reference them in any way other than the opening of the article.

DeploreSep. 01, 2011 - 01:46PM JST

Are you suggesting we don't take advantage of our technological superiority?

What an odd question. I said use of remote control weapons was cowardly. You totally failed to address if it was or not. No wonder my statement annoys you. You feel the truth of it so keenly, you cannot be bothered to address it directly!

During a fight, if one man threw sand in the other's eyes, would you say it was brave? If two men fight and one starts walking away, and the other whips out a knife and stabs him in the back, would you say he was brave? A land mine ban was made for a reason. Use of poison gas was banned for a reason. Agent orange is banned for a reason. And part of the reason is that its downright cowardly to use those things. Bombing from the air has been banned in the past for this very reason.

Mind you, I would not mind use of this tech in a purely defensive confllict. But this is not it. Armor is defensive. I have no problem with armor. I also don't have a problem with technological advantage. I have a great big problem with risk free combat where the other side takes all the risk. I would love to see a rock 'em sock 'em robot war though, where nobody takes any risk. But when you can kill by remote control, it takes all the responsibility out of it. Frankly, if you don't believe enough in a war YOU created to risk your life on that war, you should not be starting that war.

This method of combat is so cowardly, it is going to bring us more terrorism in the future. Yet, the fight was to prevent terror, or so we are told.

What a disgusting sick country. It is quite easy to believe that they made black people sit on the back of buses.

Hardly 20 comments, very few participants...though, JT has large majority of AMERICAN redears...that speaks volume.

During a fight, if one man threw sand in the other's eyes, would you say it was brave? If two men fight and one starts walking away, and the other whips out a knife and stabs him in the back, would you say he was brave? A land mine ban was made for a reason. Use of poison gas was banned for a reason. Agent orange is banned for a reason. And part of the reason is that its downright cowardly to use those things. Bombing from the air has been banned in the past for this very reason.

Mind you, I would not mind use of this tech in a purely defensive confllict. But this is not it. Armor is defensive. I have no problem with armor. I also don't have a problem with technological advantage. I have a great big problem with risk free combat where the other side takes all the risk. I would love to see a rock 'em sock 'em robot war though, where nobody takes any risk. But when you can kill by remote control, it takes all the responsibility out of it. Frankly, if you don't believe enough in a war YOU created to risk your life on that war, you should not be starting that war.

This method of combat is so cowardly, it is going to bring us more terrorism in the future. Yet, the fight was to prevent terror, or so we are told.

Just odd.

When the CIA would launch drone attacks in Pakistan, the NYPD would dispatch rakers to Pakistani neighborhoods to listen for angry rhetoric and anti-American comments, current and former officials involved in the program said.

Obama stepped up the drone attacks, so I guess there weren't many hurt feewings among Pakistani Americans in NY.

"There were those who, during World War II, said, `Good, I'm glad they're interning all the Japanese-Americans who are living here,'" Clarke said. "But we look back on that period with disdain."

Count me among them. Hard to believe FDR is an icon to so many progs.

Cops need to be working on preventing crime, not just cleaning up after the crimes happen. My suspicion is that there is a similar group of cops that hang around wherever large groups of people with similar interests congregate- neighborhoods with gangs, organized crime, synagogues, motorcycle clubs, Freemason lodges, etc. The vast majority of the time they don't learn anything useful, but every once in awhile they pick up some info that can be used to stop a larger crime. The cop that follows me around because of what's on my car or because I'm riding a motorcycle is going to be disappointed & no, it doesn't make me feel any less free. Different story perhaps if I know the cop is there & I see him every day, but that doesn't seem to be the case here (i.e., it wasn't the Muslim community complaining of police harassment).

Then they bring up some kind of "electronic data embedded in the file" but I can guarantee that not a single person here can tell me exactly what that means.

All electronic files have extra data called metadata attached to them. Metadata contains information about the file that may or may not (and usually isn't) used when that file is viewed.

For example, look at the HTML source of this page. Right click on the page, and look for something like 'source' or 'view source'. This will show you the HTML that this page is built on. Everything between the opening <head> tag and the closing </head> tag is meta data. It is information about this document, but nothing in their will be seen in the page when you are viewing it.

Photos will have location metadata attached, as well as size, resolution, and timestamp of the image. Word documents will have the author and computer name. And so on.

Transporting information can be done in much the same way. Data is added to a file, usually an innocuous one. If anybody opens the file, they see the contents of the file, not the data that has been embedded the actual data structure of the file itself.

I should proofread before posting.

In this case, the official would have checked the metadata of the file to see if it all matched up properly - location, computer, user, any other identifiers they may have. It's actually a proper way of validating a file.

Just odd.

I see you can't define a problem either, which only validates what I said. I can certainly understand that some people desperately want to shy away from issues like cowardice, bravery, honor and dishonor. For some, those things will never be properly understood or appreciated, and indeed, have zero meaning, leading to an inability to discuss them.

However, we do have the idea of technology taking care of an immediate goal but creating a long term problem. This is what the drones do, and I should think you should at least be able to appreciate that.

hakuman: Transporting information can be done in much the same way. Data is added to a file, usually an innocuous one. If anybody opens the file, they see the contents of the file, not the data that has been embedded the actual data structure of the file itself.

I actually understand all of that. What I don't get is that you can only see that information if you have the file in your hands. If the AP has the presentation in their hands, which they would need in order to see the tags, they obviously aren't releasing details about the presentation or referencing it in any specific way in the article. It seems that if they had details about the organization given by someone high up (as referenced by tags) then they would just publish that and let everyone see everything about what the organization is about from the people actually running it. But they didn't.

And the tags on something like a PowerPoint presentation would should things like creation date, who created it, and last access, but in reality it's not a complete history of the document, and I've never seen it being used as actual proof of anything.

Oracle: I see you can't define a problem either, which only validates what I said. I can certainly understand that some people desperately want to shy away from issues like cowardice, bravery, honor and dishonor. For some, those things will never be properly understood or appreciated, and indeed, have zero meaning, leading to an inability to discuss them.

We aren't really discussing them. I was just responding to your "drone manifesto" which is coming along nicely. A few more rewrites and you should have a decent working copy finalized. Drones make the powerful even more powerful, and power inequity makes you scared. So we all sit here and read the really odd posts so you can have just a little less fear for a brief period. It really has nothing to do with bravery/cowardice in war.

We aren't really discussing them.

Until you butted in , yes, we were. You were not part of the "we" and you don't get to dictate what we discuss either, and it was not power inequality. It was cowardice and dishonor and how that will bring the terrorist chicken home to America to roost.

The only thing odd about my posts are the inability of people to address their contents, and instead try to talk about something else.

Haha, this is like old times looking for the Communists amongst us during the Cold War.

Oracle: It was cowardice and dishonor and how that will bring the terrorist chicken home to America to roost.

Just odd.

I have to agree with superlib.

"Drones make the powerful even more powerful, and power inequity makes you [ oracle ] scared."

By oracle's logic real AlQaeda and foreign 'freedom fighters' (as he probably calls them) in Afghanistan would ride their camels there from Yemen and Algeria and the suburbs of London, rather than going there by something as 'cowardly' as an airplane.

I have to thank Lucabrasi. His comments on a related thread reminded me that a look at what the British press has to say on certain controversial topics in America can often be far more revealing than what the liberal establishment media in the US is prepared to tell you:

"One in five American Muslims knows of support for extremism in their community, new research has found, despite Muslims being far happier about the state of the US than other groups."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8731604/One-in-five-US-Muslims-knows-of-extremist-support-in-community.html