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Former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI’s New York City office, said on The Kelly File on Thursday that FBI agents are “petrified” of being fired apparently because of White House orders that say the bureau cannot investigate “anything to do with Muslims” in the traditional way the bureau would pursue criminals or potential criminals and terrorists.
originally posted by: Krazysh0t
a reply to: TechniXcality
Well newsflash. We aren't at war with the Muslim religion. Also, it's nice to see you have reasoning for stripping Americans of their rights. It's always funny how you conservatives are always going on about how the left is all totalitarian this, stripping freedoms that. But when you righties get just a LITTLE scared y'all suddenly start yelling about infringing on freedoms. Hey question, what was the partisan slant of the administration that put the PATRIOT Act into effect?
Well I guess I'm going to continue to push to have your 2nd Amendment right stripped. I of course will be pushing to keep mine, because I'm not so terrified of outlier statistics to the point that I want to compromise my freedoms to fight it. But if you want to strip rights from others, you don't deserve your own rights.
For more than six years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, this secretive police spying program targeted New York and New Jersey Muslims solely because of their faith.
Officers in the New York City Police Department’s Demographics Unit infiltrated Muslim student groups, eavesdropped on conversations between Muslims, spied on Muslim-owned businesses, recorded the sermons of imams, catalogued Muslims who Americanized their surnames, and placed informants and undercover officers inside mosques.
But after the program was exposed in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by The Associated Press, an NYPD officer was forced to admit that all that spying had been for naught.
In a sworn deposition submitted to the court as part of a lawsuit, the chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division, Lt. Paul Galati, conceded that the mass NYPD surveillance of Muslims had yielded exactly zero leads into criminal or terrorist activity.
That’s right: zero leads.
And while the Demographics Unit has since been disbanded amid multiple lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, the effects of the NYPD spying program linger.
A 2012 CUNY Law School report, “Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying And Its Impact On American Muslims,” found that “surveillance of Muslims’ quotidian activities has created a pervasive climate of fear and suspicion, encroaching upon every aspect of individual and community life.”
“Surveillance has chilled constitutionally protected rights—curtailing religious practice, censoring speech and stunting political organizing,” the report said. The surveillance also “severed the trust that should exist between the police department and the communities it is charged with protecting.”
Surveilling a group of people based on their religion is always a bad idea, says David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center On Terrorism And Homeland Security at Duke University.
“First, it’s almost certainly unconstitutional,” Schanzer said. “Second of all, it’s a big waste of time. That’s what the NYPD found. If you have limited resources, and you surveil people without any sort of evidence that they’re likely to engage in crime, then you’re spending a huge amount of resources surveilling the innocent. It’s a big waste of time and money.”
“The third reason it’s problematic: If people feel like they are being pursued and surveilled by the government and they’ve done nothing wrong, you’re going to destroy the kind of trust you need to combat extremism. Communities that are fearful of government backlash, of religious-based discrimination, are going to be fearful of cooperation and of coming forward with knowledge that they might have about a suspicious individual.”
Krazysh0t! An enemy combatant has no such rights!
originally posted by: BlueJacket
a reply to: Krazysh0t
You mean like the due process the left wants to rob from gun owners with no fly no buy?