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Court: Lawsuit Over NYPD Surveillance of Muslims Can Proceed (washingtonpost.com)
PolygamousRanchKid sends this report from the Washington Post:
A federal court said Tuesday that a civil rights lawsuit accusing police in New York City of improperly singling out Muslims for surveillance could proceed, reversing a lower court's decision last year to dismiss the case. In its opinion (PDF), a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected the city's call to have the case dismissed and brushed aside any suggestion that media reports about the surveillance, rather than the surveillance itself, caused any harm.
The lawsuit claims that surveillance of Muslim people in New Jersey discriminated against them due to their religion. It was filed by Muslim Advocates, a legal advocacy group, and later joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights, another legal organization, on behalf of several New Jersey Muslims who say they were unconstitutionally monitored by the New York Police Department. ... Last year, the NYPD disbanded the unit involved in the surveillance activities, a move that Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) praised in a statement at the time as "a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve."
The lawsuit claims that surveillance of Muslim people in New Jersey discriminated against them due to their religion. It was filed by Muslim Advocates, a legal advocacy group, and later joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights, another legal organization, on behalf of several New Jersey Muslims who say they were unconstitutionally monitored by the New York Police Department. ... Last year, the NYPD disbanded the unit involved in the surveillance activities, a move that Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) praised in a statement at the time as "a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve."
I sometimes wonder if there will be a time when we (US Government... or any government) wont look at someones race or religion as a threat and start looking more at the individual's past actions instead. I guess the only way that could change would be if we got more diverse people into government leadership positions... or if people would stop being so scared at things they don't understand. Our fear is usually the result of our own downfall.
This kind of discrimination is perfectly logical and desirable.
If these people had a non-religious ideology which included hating/killing/repressing Jews, Homosexuals, non-believers by violence, e.g. (Neo)-Nazism (Godwin's fallacy aside), then the Authorities would be allowed to be all over them.
After all, only just a few Nazis killed Jews, Romas, and Homosexuals. The vast majority of Nazis were good law abiding folk. You can't judge all Nazis by the actions of just a small minority- that would be racist oh sorry, I meant bigoted
Nazism is an ideology of peace! (eventually, for those who follow it)
The lawsuit claims that surveillance of Muslim people in New Jersey discriminated against them due to their religion.
What would a Jersey Muslim sound like?
Islamists are dangerous far beyond their numbers, statistically. The problem is that you can't tell them apart from Muslims. There is a lot of overlap, and neither Islamists nor Muslims are willing to help us differentiate the two groups.
A funny thing about people is that we tend to protect ourselves. If the peaceful means of protection are not available to people, the people will tend to use non-peaceful means. Attempting to identify and track a group that is a self-professed threat to us is a peaceful means of protection.
The world will tremble at the building backlash, if the pressure isn't allowed a safe release.
Posting anon. I can afford to burn the karma, but when something this obvious is pointed out, most people assume (even after I explicitly deny) that I'm in favor of it.
I have to wonder if Mayor de Blasio will force the NYC PD to take a dive on this suit to get a particular precedent into law like the Obama administration has done?
The would seem to be as easy method of advancing the agenda in a way hard to reverse. Of course that probably won't work out well for everyone else.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Islam is matched with Christianity and Jewish for all the time dumbest, most insane concepts on earth.
What's amusing about this statement is how related they actually are - all three (nearly-)linearly descend from each other, all rooted in the Abrahamic religion. Christianity's Old Testament is Judaism's Torah and other books; the Quran has very similar situations, oftentimes with names or small details changed (or sometimes not - "Mary" is a bigger deal in Islam than she is in Christianity).
Similarly, all three have equal numbers of people who pretend the horrifying parts of their books don't exist, and those who take those horrifying parts literally.
It was actually a donkey but anyway. Islam is defensive and it has a right to be because of these crazy ideas. At least with Christianity you have the New Testament which is reasonably sane.
You could drop Jesus in almost any country in any century and he would bring peace, or try to dying. With Mohamed you'd just have a big perverted mess on your hands.
The NYPD is WAY outside its jurisdiction here... it operates in NY under the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most well-respected in the country.
This is sort of like the Chinese complaining that counterintelligence focuses on them as being in a group that provides possible spies for China.
What do you expect? Should counterintelligence focus on Swedes instead?
Get real. You focus on where the problem is likely to be. Is that somehow "discrimination" or "unfair" or just common sense?
Islam is now the largest criminal prison gang in the UK. Muslim rape gangs run riot, and they openly target the military. Is it any surprise that we want to keep an eye on them?
So is your thinking that when facing the persistent long term threat of violent extremists Islamists (which are pretty much exclusively Muslim) dedicated to the overthrow of Western civilization that the proper course of action is to search for violent Buddhists, Lutherans, and atheists? Because, Diversity!??
I kinda' want to get back to the mode where the crime comes before the investigation, you know?
Crime's been going down, we're currently at the lowest point it's been for decades.
We're starting to get a handle on what causes crime, and it turns out to be completely unrelated to policing or enforcement or longer jail sentences or anything like that: it's things like tetra-ethyl-lead wearing out of the environment, access to abortions for unwanted pregnancies 20 years ago, economic security, and things like that.
The police seem to think it's their job to prevent crime from happening, and they're bored because they have nothing else to do, and so they take great pains to try to predict who will commit a crime and take action before it happens.
We're seeing this already in things like parallel construction, seeing which crimes can be extended to cover an action they don't like, and arresting people for "planning" to join ISIS.
On that last one: people aren't attacking America, didn't join a group that attacks America, didn't go to the country where they *could* have joined the group that attacks America, and didn't have a *plane ticket* to go to the country where they *could* have joined the group that attacks America...
and yet, posting "I'm going to join ISIS" on your facebook page is enough to get you thrown in jail in this country. It's "pre-crime" prosecution.
I kinda' want to get back to the mode where the crime comes before the investigation, you know?
In the early years of the expansion of the Islamic Empire, during the last years of its prophet's life, the empire used the technique of hit and run brigandage on the surrounding territories as a way to soften them up for subsequent invasion. The reality is that Islam can reasonably be argued to be a moral legitimation for an expansionist empire; that the Arabs got to FRANCE before being turned back is not usually known.
Of course there are some Muslims who are embarrassed by this history, and merely endorse Islam because that's what they grew up in. The problem is whether we should believe what they say, or realising that Islam regards itself at war with all outsiders, justifying deceiving them, treat all denials with great scepticism. And if so, do we argue that Islam is a criminal organisation? If not, why not?
You could have said "well the 9/11 terrorists were men, so we'll spy on all men", .... what do men expect, that they should spy on women?!
All of the terrorists were CIA trained or trained by terrorists who were CIA trained (Al Qaeda = the database or list, referring to the list of Mujahadeen trained by the CIA). So if you want to focus on a narrow set, the most obvious set was the people from the CIA list and their associates. That would have been useful.
If you wanted a wider set, a set of people who've traveled to those hot spot countries in the last few years would have been useful maybe. But the more broad the list, the more noise and less signal.
As the list gets wider and wider, it gets worth less and less. So NYPD wanted some big broad surveillance and chose a weak selector to give themselves an excuse for a mass surveillance. Essentially worthless.
"Should counterintelligence focus on Swedes instead?"
You realize they "focus" mostly on Americans? Co-Traveller for example. The surveillance is skewed by the quantity of data, so easy to get data (i.e. US and UK data) is searched while difficult to get data is not searched. Is it useful to do that?
I put "focus" in quotes because blanket surveillance like that is not focus, its the opposite. Focus requires that you ignore noise and concentrate on signal, not build giant database of noise to swamp any signal on every search.
Koran 9:29 is one of the last non-abrogated verses of the Koran and states:
Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.
This aya replaces pretty much everything else in Islam. It is amazing that so many Slashdotters have so many opinions on Islam without understanding some of the fundamental doctrines of Islam (which Islamists try to keep hidden from you).
At the heart of the Western liberal mindset are two basic assumptions: everyone has essentially the same beliefs as us, and it's all right to ignore all evidence to the contrary. This derives from an over optimistic reading of history combined with the propensity of modern theology to interpret all the difficult bits of the bible away.
Such people therefore assume that everyone else does the same to their scriptures and end up with core beliefs just like them. When they find they don't, they are forced to conclude that these must be a small minority - because the alternative is to challenge their deeply held beliefs. And lo - they rate your contribution as a troll. Funny that...
Now it can well be argued that conservatives are TOO pessimistic - but at least we don't get unpleasantly surprised...
And I thought only Britain, Norway and Sweden were mad not talking about an epidemic of muslin gang rapes not be be labeled racist...
Why pick on Muslim people, just last week I was walking down the street and spotted this group of Nichiren Buddhists approaching in the distance, I had to cross the street and walk back the way I came from.
Also, there are hundreds of thousands of muslims in NY... it's hard to believe the cops singled out those folks for random harassment just 'cause they felt like it. There probably were suspicious indicators that they picked up. Yes, false positives happen... sucks for everyone involved (yes, the gov wasted our tax dollars on that false positive).
The point is that the government surveilled everyone who attended a mosque, because they had the narrative that some terrorists are Muslim, completely ignoring that few Muslims are terrorists. There were hundreds of thousands of false positives. There were so many false positives that they completely obscured any true positives. Profiling that way just doesn't work.
Look, here's some numbers: in the past 20 years, approximately 60 acts of terror on US soil by Muslims, 140 by 'ecoterrorists,' and 270 by 'right wing' groups. Roughly 12% Islamic terrorism, even though Muslims make up only 1% of the US population. Surely, this means a Muslim is 12x more likely to be a terrorist than is a Christian or non-religious person. This means the incidence of terrorists in the Muslim population is 1/1,040,000, so focusing an investigation on Muslims results in approximately 1e6 false positives for every actual terrorist.
And you're far far more likely to accidentally drown your swimming pool than be killed by a gun; do you advocate that swimming pools are the biggest source of terrorism?
That statistic in only true if you restrict your investigation to children under 14. The actual number of drownings in the US is about 3900/year (CDC), while the number of non-suicide gun deaths is around 12,000/year. (Gun suicides around 21,000/year)
More importantly, the number of people murdered by swimming pools is about 15, so keeping special surveillance of swimming pool owners is not going to reduce the number of homicides very much. 15 drowning murders/10 million swimming pools = 1/670,000. 12,000 gun homicides/100 million gun owners = 1/8,300.
And, relevant to the topic at hand, there's about 1 Islamic terrorist attack in the US per year. 1 Terrorist/3 million Muslims. You know, maybe we should keep an eye on those swimming pool owners.
While good and evil are subjective terms, there is no doubt that the United States is the most violent nation on earth. When you consider that 90% of the indigenous peoples of the Americas died out as a consequence of European incursion, follow through the million dead of the U.S. civil war, then culminate in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is no doubt that we have earned this status.
Perhaps it is necessary to inflict violence on the world, and perhaps not. I would prefer a more congenial nation, but life is rarely about what we want.
The fact that a lot of dreadful things have been done in the name of religion - and in the name of atheism (thus Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot's suppression of religion) doesn't mean we can regard all religions equally. It is most appropriate to look at the earliest expressions of the religion, and decide whether its roots are flawed, or whether it's merely a minority within it that are a problem. On this basis Christianity gets a pass - though with a 'room for improvement' given the Vatican's record over child abuse, the Russian Orthodox inability to tear itself away from Putin's embrace, and some of the more obnoxious elements in Protestantism, including rank homophobia - condemning people for how they are tempted, not merely how they live - as well as the prosperity preachers.
By contrast that nice Ayatollah Khomeni offers us his agenda for Islam:
Islam’s jihad is a struggle against idolatry, sexual deviation, plunder, repression, and cruelty. The war waged by [non-Islamic] conquerors, however, aims at promoting lust and animal pleasures. They care not if whole countries are wiped out and many families left homeless. But those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation. For they shall live under [God’s law].... Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless.'
Barry M. Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, eds. Anti-American terrorism and the Middle East: A documentary reader. (Oxford: OUP, 2004) 29
'Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless.'
Of course it's nice to be nice to Muslims. Being nice to poisonous snakes is also a good strategy... There are peaceful Muslims - and that's good. However opinion polls point to an awful lot who aren't - and those are the ones who admit their dangerous beliefs. https://muslimstatistics.wordp...