9 Secrets Of The NYPD’s Spy Unit Revealed In ‘Enemies Within’ - DailyBeast

9 Secrets of the NYPD’s Spy Unit Revealed in ‘Enemies Within’
In the wake of 9/11, the NYPD launched a huge surveillance program. In the new book Enemies Within, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman detail the radical counterterrorism plan that destroyed the city’s privacy.
Abe Haglage - DailyBeast
Aug 29, 2013 6:23 AM EDT

<snip>

While peering out onto the burning rubble at Ground Zero in the days after September 11, Ray Kelly (then an executive at Bear Stearns) had an epiphany: “The NYPD needs its own intelligence unit.” If the federal government continued to hold a monopoly on nationwide intelligence information, he theorized, the NYPD would simply be “waiting to respond to the next [terrorist] attack” and “helpless to prevent it.” Sworn in as New York City police commissioner just four months later in January 2002, the former Wall Streeter made it his mission to ensure that the NYPD would have the power—and intelligence—to stop something like this from happening on NYC soil again.

Doing so would require the creation of a secret, highly invasive intelligence unit in New York City that would “rival the FBI” and focus on the city in a way that that national organization never could. For this, he’d need the help of David Cohen, a retired CIA officer who had also gone to Wall Street. Together, Kelly and Cohen, whom he appointed as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, launched a top-secret spying unit in New York City—the first of its kind.

To be effective at spotting “homegrown terrorists” and “thwarting their attacks,” the program wanted officers who could delve into the personal lives of innocent citizens in Muslim communities. And delve they did.

In the forthcoming book Enemies Within, AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman rake through never-before-published NYPD documents and intelligence interviews to find out exactly how much damage this invasive spying unit did to innocent New Yorkers—most of whom were Muslims. The answer, Apuzzo and Goldman found, was a lot.

Below, nine shocking revelations about the NYPD’s top-secret spying unit:

More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/29/9-secrets-of-the-nypd-s-spy-unit-revealed-in-enemies-within.html