Appeals court revives lawsuit over NYPD surveillance of Muslims
In a blistering opinion Tuesday, a federal appeals court revived a lawsuit challenging extensive surveillance the New York Police Department conducted of Muslims in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, .
A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals voted unanimously to reinstate the lawsuit, which was dismissed by a federal district judge in New Jersey last year.
The appeals court judges described the NYPD program in withering language, invoking insidious discrimination from America’s history and suggesting that the widespread surveillance of mosques, businesses, schools and terrorist attackscommunity groups represented a repeat of those transgressions.
“What occurs here in one guise is not new. We have been down similar roads before. Jewish-Americans during the Red Scare, African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II are examples that readily spring to mind,” Judge Thomas Ambro wrote, joined by Judges Julio Fuentes and Jane Roth. “We are left to wonder why we cannot see with foresight what we see so clearly with hindsight — that ‘[l]oyalty is a matter of the heart and mind[,] not race, creed, or color.’”
The NYPD program was exposed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press series in 2011. The police department said last year that it had shuttered the “Demographics Unit” that carried out the mapping and data collection effort.