NYPD tracks Muslims who change names

For generations, immigrants have shed their ancestral identities and taken new, Americanized names as they found their place in the melting pot. For Muslims in New York, that rite of assimilation is now seen by police as a possible red flag in the hunt for terrorists.

The NYPD monitors everyone in the city who changes his or her name, according to interviews and internal police documents obtained by The Associated Press. For those whose names sound Arabic or might be from Muslim countries, police run comprehensive background checks that include reviewing travel records, criminal histories, business licenses and immigration documents.

All this is recorded in police databases for supervisors, who review the names and select a handful for police to visit.

The program was conceived as a tripwire for police in the difficult hunt for homegrown terrorists, where there are no widely agreed upon warning signs. Like other NYPD intelligence programs created in the past decade, this one involved monitoring behavior protected by the First Amendment.

Since August, an AP investigation has revealed a vast NYPD intelligence-collecting effort targeting Muslims after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Police have conducted surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling daily life there. Police infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds more.

Monitoring name changes illustrates how the threat of terrorism now casts suspicion over what historically has been part of America's story.David Cohen, the NYPD's intelligence chief, worried that would-be terrorists could use their new names to lie low in New York, current and former officials recalled. Reviewing name changes was intended to identify people who either Americanized their names or took Arabic names for the first time, said the officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to messages left over two days asking about the legal justification for the program and whether it had identified any terrorists.

Sometime around 2008, state court officials began sending the NYPD information about new name changes, said Ron Younkins, the court's chief of operations. The court regularly sends updates to police, he said. The information is all public, and he said the court was not aware of how police used it.

The NYPD program began as a purely analytical exercise, according to documents and interviews. Police reviewed names received from the court and selected some for background checks.

Early on, police added people with American names to the list so that if details of the program ever leaked out, the department would not be accused of profiling, according to a person briefed on the program.

The legal justification for the program is unclear from the documents obtained by the AP.

Because of its history of spying on anti-war protesters and political activists, the NYPD has long been required to follow a federal court order when gathering intelligence. That order allows the department to conduct background checks only when police have information about possible criminal activity, and only as part of "prompt and extremely limited" checking of leads.

The NYPD's rules also prohibit opening probes based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment. Federal courts have held that people have a right to change their names and, in the case of religious conversion, that right is protected by the First Amendment.