Haroon Moghul and others on Al-Jazeera​'s The Inside Story, Talking NYPD and the Muslim Community

Following the latest revelations, Keith Ellison, a Democrat congressman and a Muslim, told Al Jazeera:

"Law enforcement must be done in accordance with the constitution, that means just snooping and spying on people where there's no factual basis to believe that they're involved in any kind of criminal activity just because of what their religion is, is disturbing to me. The NYPD crossed a moral line… whether they crossed a legal one is yet to be determined.

"The basic theme of our constitution is that if you're not doing anything wrong, government is supposed to leave you alone. But if somebody… a Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu or anyone is doing something that looks like it's going to break the law, or is dangerous or harmful to others, then it is in fact the job of law enforcement to stop that."

So has the NYPD violated civil liberties by spying on Muslims? Should the US government investigate what has taken place?

To discuss this with presenter Lisa Fletcher on Inside Story Americas are: Sahar Aziz, a law professor at the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law and a former advisor for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the US Department of Homeland Security; Sebastian Gorka, a national security analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; and Haroon Moghul from the online magazine Religion Dispatches who has been working with Muslim groups in New York since these revelations were published.

We also invited representatives of the NYPD, the office of Michael Bloomberg, the New York mayor, and the US Department of Justice to appear on Al Jazeera, but they either declined or did not return our calls.

 http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/02/20122249920391691.html

via Haroon