Reporters questioned Mayor Bloomberg today about the recent AP report that the NYPD was keeping tabs on Muslims at universities like Yale and UPenn, and the Mayor unapologetically defended the practices. "We have to keep this country safe. This is a dangerous place. Make no mistake about it," Bloomberg said, according to a transcript by the Daily News. Asked to comment on the reports that an undercover NYPD officer went on a whitewater rafting trip sponsored by a Muslim Student Association, Bloomberg replied, "I have no idea. The only whitewater rafting I’ve done I did with my daughter. I don’t think she had a lot of information that I was interested in."

"This is an issue that does not call for a glib response," Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the NYCLU said, referring to the Mayor's two mentions of a whitewater rafting trip that bordered on non-sequitur. "It's not an appropriate response to the students who have been spied upon just because they're Muslim."

Does Mayor Bloomberg really consider New York City to be a "dangerous place?" "No, he considers the world a dangerous place," Bloomberg's press secretary Stu Loeser wrote via email. We guess that's why "the world" is within the NYPD's anti-terrorism purview.

The president of Yale University recently commented that "police surveillance based on religion, nationality, or peacefully expressed political opinions is antithetical to the values of Yale, the academic community, and the United States." To this, Mayor Bloomberg answered, "I don’t know why keeping the county safe is antithetical to the values of Yale…If going on web sites and looking for information is not what Yale stands for I don’t know. It’s the freedom of information."

But does the mayor agree that surveillance based on one's religion or nationality is against the basic principles of this country? Loeser declined to answer that question, writing, "To read most of the coverage of this topic, one would never know that the digital surveillance that the document refers to is police personnel simply directing everyday web browsers to websites that anyone can look at." Indeed, but this information was stamped "SECRET" by the NYPD.

During the press conference, Loeser stepped in, noting that the NYPD has kept tabs on groups like the Jewish Defense League, the IRA, and Puerto Rican separatists in the 70s and 80s. "The history of that type of surveillance is a long and not-proud one," Lieberman says, pointing to the Panther 21 scandal as evidence. "It's funny Stu Loeser would use that sorry history as justification."

"To be sure, terrorism is a very serious issue to all New Yorkers, to all Americans," Lieberman said. "But it does not justify transforming our society from a democracy to one where the police are free to spy on people solely based on their faith."