The NYPD spent at least a year monitoring, infiltrating, and investigating groups planning to hold protests at the Republican National Convention in 2006. And now, wouldn’t you know it, the department doesn’t want to talk about it.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the NYPD kept secret files on hundreds of GOP critics, even if they had harmless, legal intentions.
For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.
From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show. They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.
To be sure, some of the spying turned up evidence that a handful of protesters planned to do more than just engage in lawful assembly. The problem, of course, is that the NYPD also wasted an enormous amount of time, money, and staff resources spying and keeping records on groups like Billionaires for Bush, who were obviously harmless. (They’re a satirical troupe that dresses in tuxedos and gowns to provide faux endorsements of the administration.)
It led to useless and wasteful surveillance.
In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.
As Michael Froomkin put it, “Political speeches and videos! The horror!”
What NYC Cops did may well have been legal. But it was not only a distraction from real police work, but something that bespeaks a level of one-sided political paranoia that is a danger to democracy.
Can you imagine the police infiltrating the Federalist Society? Or a meeting of the Freepers? And even if you can, could two wrongs make a right?
Good questions, all. We might be able to get some answers from the NYPD’s surveillance records, which local officials don’t want to share.
Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.
In papers filed in federal court last week, the city’s lawyers also say that the documents could be “misinterpreted” because they were not intended for the public.
That’s not a particularly compelling reason. I expected officials to go with a national-security explanation: “If we showed you how and why we spy on law-abiding Americans, the terrorists win.” Instead, however, the rationale seems to be entirely self-serving: “If we showed you how and we spy on law-abiding Americans, we’re liable to look pretty bad.” I doubt this is going to fly.
If, in 2006, some of these law-abiding progressive groups had claimed that they were being spied on, just because they wanted to register disgust with the Bush administration, many would have dismissed them as paranoid.
Sometimes, I’m afraid, we’re not cynical enough.