New York mayor defends monitoring of Muslim students on Web

New York: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Tuesday defended the New York Police Department's monitoring of the Web sites of Muslim student groups at more than a dozen universities across the Northeast, framing the effort as one way to guard against the threat of terrorism.

"The Police Department goes where there are allegations, and they look to see whether those allegations are true," Mr. Bloomberg said at an appearance at the Brooklyn Public Library. "That's what you would expect them to do. That's what you would want them to."

The mayor's support of the department's intelligence-gathering came as officials at several universities expressed deep concern over what they called a manner of police activity that they had been in the dark about for years.

Yale University's president, Richard C. Levin, said in an e-mail on Sunday to students and faculty and staff members, "I am writing to state, in the strongest possible terms, that police surveillance based on religion, nationality or peacefully expressed political opinion is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community and the United States."

Dr. Levin added: "The Yale Muslim Students Association has been an important source of support for Yale students during a period when Muslims and Islam itself have too often been the target of thoughtless stereotyping, misplaced fear and bigotry."

According to an internal Police Department report from Nov. 22, 2006, an officer from the Cyber Intelligence Unit had the "daily routine" of monitoring the Web sites, blogs and forums of Muslim student groups at 16 universities, including several in New York City and across the state, as well as Ivy League colleges. The report was first disclosed in an article by The Associated Press on Saturday that described various police efforts to monitor Muslim students.

The report, labeled "Weekly MSA Report," catalogs six events in 2006 at three universities and includes the names of lecturers and, in one case, of a University at Buffalo student who posted a message about one event. It highlights, for instance, that Muslim students at Buffalo that week publicized an event featuring Muslim scholars from abroad. It details how Muslim students at New York University offered religious instruction for new converts, and it says that at Rutgers a prayer day was announced online.

Thirteen other Muslim student associations - including the one at Yale and another at the University of Pennsylvania - did not post any plans online that caught the attention of the Police Department during that week in 2006. But the report is notable for what it does not say: It remains unclear if anyone from the department attended the events or if the information led to further inquiries by the police. The report, stamped "N.Y.P.D. Secret," indicates it was specifically prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, has pointed out that the information in the report came from "open sources" on the Internet. On Tuesday, the mayor echoed that notion in responding to criticism from Yale.

"If going on Web sites and looking for information is not what Yale stands for," Mr. Bloomberg said, "I don't know."

The mayor also repeated assertions by the police that several convicted terrorists had been involved in Muslim student associations.

"Of course, we're going to look at anything that's publicly available, in the public domain," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We have an obligation to do so, and it is to protect the very things that let Yale survive."

Mr. Browne said the Police Department "assembled reports," in 2006 and 2007, on Muslim student associations' activity from whatever information it could glean in the public domain.

"Some of the most dangerous Western Al Qaeda-linked/inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized and/or recruited at universities in MSAs," Mr. Browne said via e-mail. "We were focused on radicalization and/or recruitment, specifically by groups like Al Muhajiroun, Islamic Thinkers Society, Revolution Muslim and others."

But Mr. Browne and a spokesman for the mayor did not answer repeated questions about whether such efforts were continuing. The A.P., in its article Saturday, reported that in April 2008 an undercover officer accompanied Muslim students from the City College of New York on a white-water rafting trip in upstate New York and listed the attendees' names in a report. Mr. Bloomberg said he had "no idea" about such a trip.

A spokesman for the City College of New York said that he could not verify that the rafting trip had occurred, but that the college did not "accept or condone any investigation of any student organization based on the political or religious content of its ideas, just as we would not accept or condone any student organization that does not abide by the law.

"Absent specific evidence linking a member of the City College community to criminal activity, we do not condone this kind of investigation."

Last week, Robert Hornsby, a spokesman for Columbia University, said he was unaware of any police monitoring of students, but added, "We would obviously be concerned about anything that could chill our essential values of academic freedom or intrude on student privacy."

John Beckman, a spokesman for New York University, said, "N.Y.U. stands in fellowship with its Muslim students in expressing our community's concerns over these activities."

And John DellaContrada, a spokesman for Buffalo, said that the university "would not voluntarily cooperate" if asked by the police to aid in surveillance.