Civil rights lawyers are reaching more than 40 years into the past to curb the New York City Police Department's program of surveillance of Muslim communities. In a court filing on Monday, lawyers added to a long-running lawsuit initially brought to address the department's spying on Vietnam War protesters, updating the case for the post-9/11 era.
The Handschu lawsuit, as it's known, "has been about NYPD surveillance of whoever is the suspected flavor of the month since 1971," said Jethro Eisenstein, a lawyer on the case since its inception.
The case is named after Barbara Handschu, a civil rights lawyer who teamed up with the Black Panthers and radical activist Abbie Hoffman, among others, to take on the NYPD in 1971. The department's "red squad," they alleged then, had infiltrated and disrupted law-abiding anti-war protest groups.
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