Recently, the New York Police Department infiltrated Brooklyn College and other surrounding schools in a covert operation to scrutinize and survey Muslim student groups, according to police records obtained by The Associated Press.

These documents revealed that secret undercover investigators were placed in these Muslim student groups to monitor their activity, including photographing and assessing the places they shopped, ate, prayed, and even where they got their hair cut. Law enforcement went as far as monitoring the students’ Internet activity by examining the websites they visited and also rummaging and participating in chat rooms.

All of this investigative activity, however, was implemented without the college administrations’ knowledge.

This greatly infringes upon the students’ civil rights and brings into question the integrity of the NYPD. Not to mention that the NYPD singled out a specific group of people, not based on their individual merits or actions, but based on their race and religion.

That is discrimination, which sadly, based on the recent activities in Alabama and Arizona (both states passed bills which enforces strict prohibition of transporting, employing, and housing illegal immigrants) is becoming the foundation of America’s social structure.

The NYPD have taken the post 9/11 scare and made it nonsensical. There is no reason to keep a select group of people under heavy surveillance without any justification other than their race or religion.

What’s worse is the extent to which the NYPD investigators were willing to go to in order to obtain incriminating evidence of the Muslim students.

NYPD detectives solicited the aid of campus police, claiming that they were working on narcotics or gang cases in order to gain access to student records. With these records, the NYPD were able to identify and obtain contact information of the Muslim students they were observing.

By handing the records over to law enforcement, the colleges involved breached the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which “protects the privacy of student education records.” Colleges are prohibited from disclosing any student records to law enforcement without a court order or subpoena. Violation of this will result in the school losing all federal funding, which includes grants, loans, and research funds.

In essence the NYPD were willing to jeopardize the financial stability of these schools in order to further harass the students, which is ridiculous.

If the investigation was at all a serious one, the law enforcement should have quickly informed these colleges for obvious safety reasons. But since they didn’t and decided to act on their own, it shows that the investigation wasn’t crucial, but was conducted under either curiosity or stupidity.