New York City is putting some effort into getting to know its Moroccan Muslim community. The NYPD Demographics unit is gathering basic intelligence about the social netowrk in the community. Whcih stores, mosques, and services are frequented by the New York Moroccan population. Juan Cole notes that the 'targeting' of Moroccans is odd as a group to surveil. It would only make sense if it were part of a larger effort to map the social networks of a large number of immigrant communities. The NYPD can easily gain insight into groups' social patterns through recruitment of officers from those communities, but it's possible that immigrant groups pose a greater challenge for some reason.
You would think that this research and study of communities that the NYPD serves would be seen as a positve development. The more information about how a community operates, the better the NYPD would be able to recruit effective allies. Lev Levitt is determined to see this move as purely sinister. In his defense, the NYPD says that the social mapping is in service of counterterrorism goals. It may be a waste of resources, but there's nothing particularly sinister about it. NB: the entire islamophobic direction of law enforcement resources has been sinister and problematic, but this instance is probably one of its least problematic expressions.
Len Levitt wondersWhere's the outrage? Where's the concern? Where's the lawsuit?
Len Levitt is a police reporter, so he can be forgiven for not knowing the first thing about civil litigation. The missing lawsuit would require that the police action has caused an injury (or is likely to cause an injury) to a specific individual. It appears that police studying population-level details of a specific immigrant group is actually harmless. Levitt is crying fire, but there's no smoke.
Here comes the real doozy of Levitt's article: the lack of harms to specific individuals (i.e. brutality, unwarranted arrests, harassment) proves that the program is illegal. Here is how Levitt puts it:Browne also said that officers only follow criminal leads when investigating terrorism, a claim belied by the NYPD's own documents, which detail the sweeping nature of its spying despite no indication of criminality.
There are no active terrorism investigations ongoing in the community. No one has faced (or will face) criminal prosecutions for actions that have been observed over the course of the intelligence-gathering operation. And as to the "spying" that Levitt reports, he cites examples of the NYPD Demographics unit creating a list of Moroccan cab drivers and designating locations that are important to the Moroccan community.The Intelligence Division's Demographics Unit assembled all this information so that if police received a tip about a Moroccan terrorist, officers would know details of the community, the AP said.
Despite using the word "spy" and its derivations 15 times in the article, there doesn't appear to be any allegation that the NYPD has even approached a 4th Amendment barrier. Taxi operaters apply for licenses from the city, and that is publicly available knowledge. People using public streets have since the dawn of time been subjected to public (including police) scrutiny. Levitt seems to understand "spying" to entail any information about the city that the government collects outside of an active investigation. To eliminate "Spying" for Levitt, police would have to begin each investigation from a blank slate, arriving on the scene with no information backed by empirical observation or prior knowledge of the community in which a crime happens.
I hope that NYPD is using the Demographics unit to create social network maps of all communities, and that the information will be used to create smart policing strategies that build alliances and place the police on the side of the communities they are supposed to serve. That's a leap of faith, and we need to pay attention to how this information is used, and whether the resources invested into the program are worthwhile. I think Juan Cole is right that the funds would better be spent mapping social networks of immigrants from more volatile areas (or from rural Michigan for that matter). That's a matter of whether police are using resources intelligently. Levitt, on the other hand, wants police to not only be dumb, but blind.
From Buffalo New York today, we have a story of excessive government waste and abuse:Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents.
The article believes this mess is the fault of the 'Buffalo homeowner' who failed to set a password for the wireless router. They're missing the much more important question: why are New York law enforcement officers bringing assault weapons to a cyber crime scene? Your tax dollars at work.
Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller's privately security detail apparently handcuffed a journalist for attempting to interview Mr. Miller. This happened over the weekend, and I was writing a post about the incident bemoaning the lack of respect for agents of the people who are attempting to pull back the curtain and familiarize the people with political elites. This would have been a pretty boring rant, so I shelved it. Following the golden rule that any story left unwritten gets better, it turns out that the private guards were actually active duty military personnel moonlighting as security guards.
I had originally shelved the post because there was no legal issue. Private citizens basically assaulted someone, but there was no constitutional question, as the first amendment only binds the federal government and (through 14th amendment incorporation) the states. Now that officers of the federal government are involved, there is a larger problem here.
Glenn Greenwald notes that military personnel are banned from partisan political activity by DoD directive. Every governmental agency that I know prohibits its agents from engaging in partisan politics on its time. Military personnel, like police officers, are cloaked more encompassingly cloaked with the authority of the state than desk clerks. If the state trains a person to use force as its agent, it has separated it from the general populace. The investment of legitimate force on an individual abrogates that individual's political rights.
The Washington Post blog is reporting a strange story out of Maryland's Harford County in which a motorcyclist was jailed for recording a traffic stop by an plain clothes police officer. The Harford County state's attorney, Joseph Cassilly, charged the motorcyclist under Maryland's anti-wiretapping law after Graber posted the video on youtube, and obtained a grand jury indictment for recording the state trooper without consent. The charging documents included three counts of violating the MD wiretap law: (1) Unlawful interception of an oral communication in voiolatino of CJ 10-402(a)(1)... (2) Unlawful disclosure of an intercepted oral communication in violation of CJ 10-402(a)(2)... (3) Unlawful possession of a device "primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of oral communications" in violation of CJ 10-403(a).
