Members of the NYU Muslim community held a meeting last night to discuss the New York Police Department's surveillance of Muslim student organizations at the university.
The Associated Press first reported in August that the NYPD had built programs to monitor local Muslim communities and mosques. The AP reported last Saturday that the department also monitored groups in colleges and universities throughout the Northeast region, including Yale University, Syracuse University and the University of Pennsylvania.
The meeting was off-the-record and closed to the press, but an anonymous source who attended said she believes her rights have been violated.
"I expect NYU to issue a statement denouncing NYPD's surveillance of students and take measures to ensure this travesty never happens again," she said.
According to NYU spokesman John Beckman, the university first learned of the surveillance when they received press inquiries from the AP.
"We appreciate that the NYPD has taken on the heavy responsibility of safeguarding New Yorkers from additional terrorist attacks," Beckman said. "We hope that the police department is employing anti-terrorism tactics other than looking at the public websites of student groups, which at a university naturally raises privacy concerns on behalf of its students."
In response to inquiries, NYPD deputy commissioner Paul Browne emailed WSN a listing of 12 cases, in which convicted or arrested terrorist suspects have been members of their college Muslim student associations.
"Under the Federal Handshu accord, for the purposes of developing intelligence information to detect or prevent terrorism or other unlawful activities, the NYPD is authorized to conduct online search activity and to access online sites and forums on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally," he said in the email.
Elizabeth Dann, outreach chair of the Muslim Law Students Association at NYU, said there was no criminal activity confirmed in the specific student groups the NYPD monitored.
"If this is something that has been going on for years and seemed to have taken a considerable degree of manpower and nothing has come out of it, as a tax payer, I would prefer that the NYPD they pursue more fruitful avenues," Dann said. "I don't think it's shown itself to be productive, and it's a waste of resources."
Mostafa Al-Alusi, a junior at Yale University and president of the Muslim Student Association, said Muslim and non-Muslim students met with the Yale administration to discuss the university's response to the surveillance.
"The administration at these universities should take a strong stance in support of their students," Al-Alusi said. "As for students and student groups, we hope that they will show solidarity with us by denouncing this and any other act of religious and racial profiling."
