Excerpt:
Drawing comparisons to the Red Scare that stretched from the late 1940s to the '50s, a federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated a civil rights lawsuit that had challenged wide-ranging surveillance by the New York Police Department of Muslim communities in New Jersey.
The Police Department, in an effort after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, sent plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods in New York City and elsewhere, infiltrated Muslim student groups and mosques, tracked the activities of Muslims and built files on people.
But the lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Newark by a group of individuals, businesses, student associations and mosques, claimed that the police surveillance illegally targeted them on the grounds that they were Muslim and that their religious identity was a "permissible proxy for criminality."