NEW YORK — A New Jersey man who says he was swept into the NYPD’s post-9/11 NYPD Muslim surveillance dragnet has filed a new lawsuit demanding the department turn over intelligence records it has long refused to confirm even exist, reviving a transparency fight as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office, Dec. 23, 2025.
Samir Hashmi, a former member of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association, is asking a New York judge to force the NYPD to process a narrower set of Freedom of Information Law requests he filed in February—seeking weekly intelligence summaries, profiles of targeted groups and reports tied to specific mosques and community organizations connected to him between 2006 and 2008, according to WIRED’s report on the new petition.
NYPD Muslim surveillance lawsuit challenges ‘Glomar’ wall
At the center of the case is the NYPD’s use of a “Glomar” response—its refusal to confirm or deny whether responsive records exist. Civil liberties groups have warned that importing Glomar-style secrecy into state public-records disputes risks hollowing out disclosure laws meant to police local government, a concern the New York Civil Liberties Union raised in a prior fight over the tactic in a briefing on the NYPD’s secrecy loophole.
Hashmi lost an earlier records case in 2018 after New York’s top court upheld the NYPD’s ability to use Glomar in response to his requests, and his new filing attempts to reframe the dispute around more specific categories of documents and time frames, the WIRED report said. Hashmi told the outlet he was also motivated by personal loss, including the death of his father and the death in November of his previous co-plaintiff, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid.
The lawsuit also lands amid heightened scrutiny of New York policing and surveillance practices. In November, Amnesty International and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project said records they obtained after a yearslong court battle showed troubling NYPD monitoring practices and the use of surveillance tools against New Yorkers, including communities of color, in their summary of the newly released documents. Hashmi’s case, while focused on older intelligence records, presses a related question: how much of the paper trail of NYPD Muslim surveillance is still being withheld from public view.
Why the timing matters under a new mayor
Mamdani, whom WIRED described as New York City’s first Muslim mayor, is set to be sworn in Jan. 1. The outlet reported that Hashmi said Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner—after the election—heightened his concern about the Intelligence Division’s legacy and pushed him to renew his effort to uncover what the NYPD collected and how it was used.
For historians and accountability advocates, the case is also a reminder that New York’s surveillance history extends beyond the post-9/11 era. The city’s Municipal Archives has detailed how the “Handschu” collection of NYPD Intelligence Unit records—dating from 1930 to 2013—documents decades of infiltration and file-building and traces the consent decree meant to curb political spying in its overview of the Handschu records.
Hashmi’s lawsuit asks whether today’s FOIL framework—codified in the Public Officers Law and administered through state open-government guidance—can actually compel meaningful disclosure when agencies invoke categorical secrecy. New York’s Committee on Open Government describes the statute’s baseline presumption of access in its FOIL law text and guidance, but the NYPD’s Glomar posture has tested the law’s practical limits.
In the longer arc of NYPD Muslim surveillance, the department has repeatedly faced fallout from revelations about undercover monitoring of Muslim student groups and mosques, including a federal settlement that required new safeguards. (See: The Guardian’s 2018 account of the settlement, the ACLU’s 2017 statement on the approved reforms, and PBS NewsHour’s 2021 reporting on the lasting community impact.)
Now, with a new administration about to start and a renewed court challenge on the table, Hashmi’s demand is straightforward: he wants the NYPD to stop treating NYPD Muslim surveillance records as too sensitive to acknowledge—and to finally show what exists, what doesn’t, and why.
