The New York City Police Foundation received a $1 million donation from the government of the United Arab Emirates, according to 2012 tax records, the same amount the foundation transferred to the NYPD Intelligence Division’s International Liaison Program that year, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
A 2012 Schedule A document filed by the New York City Police Foundation showed a list of its largest donors, which included several major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase and Barclays Capital — but also a line item for the “Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.” The Intercept obtained a copy of the Schedule A document, which is not intended for public disclosure and only shows donors above the threshold of donating $1 million over four years.
Conspicuously, while the financial institutions are listed as donors on the Police Foundation website, the UAE is absent despite being one of the largest contributors listed that year with its $1 million contribution.
Publicly disclosed tax documents filed in the same year show a $1 million cash grant from the foundation to the NYPD Intelligence Division. The purpose of the grant is to provide assistance to the NYPD International Liaison Program, which “enables the NYPD to station detectives throughout the world to work with local law enforcement on terrorism related incidents,” the foundation’s 2012 tax disclosures state.
But the foundation denies the contribution was directed to the Intelligence Division. “The gift was an unrestricted gift to the General Fund. No such donation funded the International Liaison Program,” a spokesperson for the foundation told The Intercept.
When asked for further details, the spokesperson responded, “The gift was directed to upgrade NYPD equipment and facilities used to aid in criminal investigations throughout New York City.”
The foundation refused to provide information about which “criminal investigations” or equipment upgrades were funded by the UAE.
The embassy of the United Arab Emirates declined to comment about the $1 million contribution, which has not been previously reported. A February 2013 Washington Post article listed the Police Foundation as one of several recipients of funding from the UAE, but did not specify an amount, or the source of the information.
Strikingly little is known about the intended use of the $1 million. The Police Foundation never filed a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) disclosure, a federal disclosure required from individuals and organizations (usually law firms and consultants) who work on behalf of a foreign country or political party, or any other public acknowledgement of the UAE embassy’s contribution.
A 2013 report by the Brennan Center documented the role the NYC Police Foundation plays in funding the Intelligence Division’s overseas operations. “Funding for [NYPD] counterterrorism operations comes not only from the city, state, and federal governments, but also from two private foundations,” the report said. “The New York City Police Foundation pays for the NYPD’s overseas intelligence operations, which span 11 locations around the world.”
The NYPD has had a presence in Abu Dhabi since at least 2009. In 2012, then-Commissioner Ray Kelly travelled to the UAE to sign an information-sharing agreement between the country and the department. At the time of the trip, it was disclosed that the memorandum of understanding would “[allow] for the exchange of ideas and training methods” between the NYPD and the UAE.
For its part, the UAE said in a statement released at the time that the agreement would entail “the exchange of security information as is permitted by laws” and allow both parties to “achieve general security.”
While the Liaison Program is notoriously opaque, comments by Kelly at a 2012 Carnegie Foundation event gave some insight into its operation: “[The program] has been very helpful in a variety of ways — again, funded by the Police Foundation. We are not using tax levy funds to pay their expenses. Their expenses are paid by the Foundation”.
Tag: Michael German
Why Don’t Surveillance State Defenders Seem To Care That The Programs They Love Don’t Work?
There is a strong argument for ending these programs on the basis of their high cost and lack of effectiveness alone. But they actually do damage to our society. TSA agents participating in the behavioral detection program have claimed the program promotes racial profiling, and at least one inspector general report confirmed it. Victims unfairly caught up in the broader suspicious activity reporting programs have sued over the violations of their privacy. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded the telephone metadata program violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and raised serious constitutional concerns.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed by Senate Intelligence Committee last week is yet another example of this phenomenon. Experts agree that the bill would do little, if anything, to reduce the large data breaches we’ve seen in recent years, which have been caused by bad cyber security practices rather than a lack of information about threats. If passed by the full Congress, it would further weaken electronic privacy laws and ultimately put our data at greater risk. The bill would add another layer of government surveillance on a U.S. tech industry that is already facing financial losses estimated at $180 billion as a result of the exposure of NSA’s aggressive collection programs.
The Tsarnaev Trial and the Blind Spots in ‘Countering Violent Extremism’
On April 19, 2013, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lay bleeding from gunshot wounds in a suburban Boston backyard, he scrawled a note that contained the following message:
“The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that….I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [unintelligible] it is allowed…Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
This message mirrored comments Tsarnaev would later give to investigators, in which he cited grievances over American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as his motivation for the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon.
In his trial, which begins today, more details are expected to emerge about how he went from a popular college student to an alleged homegrown terrorist.
Widely described as a “self-radicalized” terrorist, Tsarnaev now serves as a prime example of the type of individual targeted by Countering Violent Extremist (CVE) programs. Yet in fact, Tsarnaev’s life trajectory leading up to the bombing does not resemble the “path to radicalization” identified in CVE frameworks — raising questions about the capacity of these programs to intervene effectively to preempt terrorism.
FBI Flouts Obama Directive to Limit Gag Orders on National Security Letters
Despite the post-Snowden spotlight on mass surveillance, the intelligence community’s easiest end-run around the Fourth Amendment since 2001 has been something called a National Security Letter.
FBI agents can demand that an Internet service provider, telephone company or financial institution turn over its records on any number of people — without any judicial review whatsoever — simply by writing a letter that says the information is needed for national security purposes. The FBI at one point was cranking out over 50,000 such letters a year; by the latest count, it still issues about 60 a day.
The letters look like this:
Recipients are legally required to comply — but it doesn’t stop there. They also aren’t allowed to mention the order to anyone, least of all the person whose data is being searched. Ever. That’s because National Security Letters almost always come with eternal gag orders. Here’s that part:
That means the NSL process utterly disregards the First Amendment as well.
More than a year ago, President Obama announced that he was ordering the Justice Department to terminate gag orders “within a fixed time unless the government demonstrates a real need for further secrecy.”
And on Feb. 3, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced a handful of baby steps resulting from its “comprehensive effort to examine and enhance [its] privacy and civil liberty protections” one of the most concrete was — finally — to cap the gag orders:
In response to the President’s new direction, the FBI will now presumptively terminate National Security Letter nondisclosure orders at the earlier of three years after the opening of a fully predicated investigation or the investigation’s close.
Continued nondisclosures orders beyond this period are permitted only if a Special Agent in Charge or a Deputy Assistant Director determines that the statutory standards for nondisclosure continue to be satisfied and that the case agent has justified, in writing, why continued nondisclosure is appropriate.
Despite the use of the word “now” in that first sentence, however, the FBI has yet to do any such thing. It has not announced any such change, nor explained how it will implement it, or when.
