Domestic Spying Pressed
Submitted by Jeremy Savage:Domestic Spying Pressed
Big-City Police Seek to Ease Limits Imposed After Abuses Decades Ago
NEW YORK -- Arguing that this city faces a far more perilous world than once imagined, New York's police commissioner wants to toss aside a decades-old federal court decree governing the limits on police spying and surveillance of its own citizenry.
City officials argue that officers need more elbow room to photograph, tape and infiltrate political and social organizations to uproot terror networks. But civil libertarians warn of a return to the unsavory days of old, when New York's police department acquired a reputation for police "black bag" break-ins and spying on political dissidents.
It's a battle with echoes in other cities. In Chicago, officials have already weakened a court decree limiting police spying. In San Francisco, officials have reversed their own 1997 decision and have now joined an FBI terrorism task force, even though FBI surveillance of mosques and peaceful protests could violate the California constitution.
Taken together, these steps suggest a cultural and legal shift driven by fear of terrorism in cities where a civil libertarian impulse once was widely shared. Nowhere is that more noticeable than here.
"The New York Police Department had no conception of the challenge it would face in protecting the city and its people from international terrorism" when it signed the consent decree, city attorneys argue in a federal legal brief. "Clearly, the public interest in law enforcement's ability to protect it from terrorist violence is the most vital priority."
A federal trial court is expected to begin reviewing the New York case in December.
Civil libertarians argue that the fear of police abuses in a war on terror is neither speculative nor paranoid. In New York, Chicago and San Francisco, police spying and surveillance has a long and ignoble history.
"We are seeing a national phenomenon where, in the name of protecting national security against a new and subtle danger, there is a massive effort to eliminate protections for political protest," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "These safeguards were put in place in the aftermath of a documented history of systematic spying, infiltration and dirty tricks by police agencies and the FBI."(Read More)
