US balances fear and security as it pursues perceived enemies within

“NYPD officers patrol a street blocked off near the UN headquarters Does the fear justify the security or the security justify the fear?” was how a defence lawyer for one of the men accused of the 9/11 attacks on New York put it on my recent trip to Guantánamo Bay.
Over a burger and chips in the US naval base’s Irish pub, the lawyer was discussing the aggressive security measures taken by law enforcement agencies since 2001 to prevent further attacks and whether they have gone too far in encroaching on the rights and privacy of US citizens. From a lawyer representing a man locked up for more than a decade in maximum security in a US prison in Cuba, it was hardly a surprising question. However, it raises an important point about US society.
Striking a balance between protecting civil liberties and safeguarding Fortress America has grown more contentious over the past 12 years in the US and particularly in more recent times since disclosures about surveillance programmes to spy on the phone calls, emails and internet activity of everyday Americans have emerged from leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
A new book, Enemies Within, traces another area of surveillance: the activities of the New York Police Department’s intelligence division and its spying on the city’s Muslim community. The book reveals how the police legally skirted around First Amendment restrictions protecting citizens’ freedom to worship to spy on Islamic groups where they suspect, often on highly tenuous grounds, terrorist cells may be operating.
Written by Washington-based Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, members of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that revealed details about the depth of the NYPD’s spying programme, the book shows how the police categorised entire mosques as potential terrorist organisations to justify “terrorism enterprise investigations” under court-approved guidelines.

‘A miniature CIA’Stung by the failures of the US law enforcement community to respond to the warnings signs in the run-up to 9/11, the NYPD was not prepared to leave surveillance to the CIA or FBI alone and decided to create its own intelligence team with a $60 million budget that operated in “near secrecy and fancied itself as a miniature CIA,” the authors write.
The extent of the spying was far-reaching and trampled over the civil rights of average citizens, all because they were Muslim. The police recruited informants, often on minor misdemeanours, to work as “mosque crawlers” visiting centres of prayer to spy on sermons. They took note of phone numbers, email addresses and car registration plates, and listened out for any radicalised or jihadist views.

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