New York Magazine explores the reinvention of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence Division as a far-reaching anti-terrorism squad focused on Muslims after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. The story, based upon the upcoming book “Enemies Within” by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, says 9/11 “crystallized the notion that as long as the federal government controlled all the information, the NYPD was merely waiting to respond to the next attack, helpless to prevent it.”
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly called for a new approach, the likes of which America had never seen. While the FBI, CIA, and NSA built surveillance programs that monitored bank transactions, phone records and e-mails, the NYPD went even further than the federal government. The activities Kelly set in motion after 9/11 pushed deeply into the private lives of New Yorkers, surveilling Muslims in their mosques, their sporting fields, their businesses, their social clubs, even their homes in a way not seen in America since the FBI and CIA monitored antiwar activists during the Nixon administration.