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Advocacy Blog
Monday, March 26, 2007
NYC Police Spying On Groups Before Convention
The New York Times reported that the New York City Police Department's Intelligence Division sent undercover detectives around the city and country collecting information on activists planning on demonstrating at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Surveillance was not only conducted on groups that planned on disrupting the convention, but rather broadly on political activists throughout the country. Yet, the lawyers for the city say these documents should remain secret, in light of the civil lawsuits pending from the more than 1,000 arrests made during the convention.
But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped "N.Y.P.D. Secret," the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show. These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.
Read a blog post from Daily Kos here
Posted by Amanda Adams
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