The NYPD is Watching You... Abbetted by the NYCLU

The Independent reported Wednesday that over the summer the thugs running the NYPD, along with their fascist, union-busting boss Michael 'Mussolini' Bloomberg, has again intensified its surveilance of city residents.

The piece explains that while the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), "might not match the centralised police computer system seen in the movie Minority Report," it is nevertheless getting close.

The piece continues,

At the heart of the RTCC is the massive data warehouse, which provides the 37,000-strong police department, the nation's largest, with almost immediate access to billions of records, including more than five million New York State criminal records, parole and probation files; 20 million New York City criminal complaints, emergency calls and summonses spanning five years; and 33 billion public records.

Were the United States a country that treated its Constitution as something other than a "goddamned piece of paper," as my comrade said in an earlier post, this move would be immediately cast aside by the courts as an egregious and grotestque violation of civil rights on the part of a racist, authoritarian and abusive institution run by criminals and lunatics.

There is no doubt that the racist pigs at the NYPD will use "this Real Time Crime Center" to violate the Constitution. The RTCC "has 15 computer workstations and is staffed by 26 analysts and investigators, who work around the clock in shifts, delivering all manner of information to cops out in the field." The suggestion that a massive intrustion will not occur is the height of lunacy.

Which brings us to the New York Civil Liberties Union, whose principle job of late appears to be that of apogist for the police state. The NYCLU absurdly claims in the piece that it is too early to tell whether the RTCC will infringe civil liberties but promises to "keep an eye on it".

That's sure a relief - good to know they'll be on the case since it will no doubt require a real collection of super-sleuths to discover that the NYPD will use unvarnished access to billions of records to violate civil rights!

In their case challenging the constitutionality of the fear-mongering subway-searches that blatanly violates riders' 4th amendment rights, the same NYCLU refused to cross-examine NY Deputy Police Commissioner and CIA-propagandist David Cohen. Cohen, architect of the invasive and Orwellian Psy-Op, served from 1995-1997 as the CIA's Director of Operations, a euphamism for the head of covert/terrorist operations around the world. The confounding refusal on the part of the NYCLU to ask Cohen a single question sabotaged their case.

The WSWS reports,

Cohen provoked outrage among Muslim-Americans by arguing that the dropping of limits on police spying was justified at least in part by the "radicalization" of American Mosques and other Islamic institutions, which he said “shield the work of terrorists from law enforcement scrutiny by taking advantage of restrictions of the investigation of First Amendment activity.”

Tag-teaming with another technician of the police state, Judith Miller, Cohen has waged a racist campaign to scare and intimidate citizens into ceding their constitutional rights.

Using uncorroborated testimony from unnamed witnesses about undertermined threats at unknown times in uncertain places, Cohen and Richard Clarke, another serial fabricator and police state advocate, whipped up a bunch of lies about fanatical Mooooslem terrorist goblins to justify the instrusive searches. Relying on their fanciful testimony, the judge ruled that the threat of terrorism outweighed the obvious invasiveness of the searches, sanctioning them.

Significantly, Cohen's past is as pockmarked as the present. In the 1980s, he worked at the CIA under Deputy Director of Intelligence Robert Gates fabricating intelligence about the confected threat to the United States posed by the Soviet Union in a campaign similar to the one waged against Iraq in 2002/03 and against Iran today.

For the duration of his career, David Cohen has used violence and fear-mongering to advance and intensify the Military-Industrial complex's control of the US and the world. The refusal on the part of the NYCLU to raise Cohen's sordid past raises serious doubts about either their compentence or their commitment to civil liberties. Similarly, their refusal to adamently challenge the threat posed by Ray Kelly's fascistic RTCC before it has its intended effect raises serious questions about their role as enabler of and apologist for state crimes.