About 600 pages of previously secret documents were released this week, records of the NYPD’s surveillance activities in advance of the 2004 GOP convention.
The NY Times has published the Intelligence Digests here, with links to .pdf files of the original declassified documents. I thought it would be handy, though, if somebody went through and made a list of every name that comes up. The list is huge, so the whole thing is currently hogging the front of puduland if you’re curious.
Please do not leap to conclusions. Just because a name appears does not mean that the person or group was under extensive, active surveillance. In many cases, the NYPD clearly got their information from press releases and public press conferences. This is obvious from reading just a handful of the pdfs.
Then again, there was also a lot of spying involved, too. The Times has already reported that the NYPD sent officers nationwide and across half of Canada, and the vast majority of their targets were peaceful groups operating fully within the law — primarily church groups, environmentalists, peace activists and other organizations whose privacy and peaceful opposition to the GOP is supposed to be fully protected by the United States Constitution.
More via This Modern World.