The Associated Press' (AP) series exposing the New York Police Department's (NYPD) secret, pervasive and legally troublesome spying on Muslims, won the AP the highest honor in journalism - a Pulitzer Prize. The report, which exposed NYPD's blatant disregard for an individual's privacy, freedom and constitutional rights, left many shocked. And now eight Muslims in the state of New Jersey have filed a federal lawsuit to force the NYPD to end its surveillance and other intelligence-gathering practices targeting Muslims in the years after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The lawsuit alleged that the police activities were unconstitutional because they focused on people's religion, national origin and race.

It is the first lawsuit, which directly challenges the NYPD's surveillance programs, investigated by the AP. Based on internal NYPD reports and interviews with officials involved in the programs, the AP reported that the NYPD conducted wholesale surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling daily life including where people ate, prayed and got their haircuts. Police infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds more.

Syed Farhaj Hassan, one of the plaintiffs, stopped attending one mosque as often after learning that his mosque was included in the NYPD files. Those mosques were located along the East Coast from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs however; none were linked to terrorism, either publicly or in the confidential NYPD documents.

Hassan, an Army reservist from New Brunswick, N.J., said he was concerned that anything linking his life to potential terrorism would hurt his military security clearance. "Guilt by association was forced on me," Hassan explains.

The NYPD has not responded to questions about the lawsuit but noted the NJ attorney general determined in May 2012 that the NYPD's activities in NJ were legal. NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said his department is obligated to conduct such surveillances to protect NY from another 9/11. Kelly has said the 2001 attacks proved that New Yorkers could not rely solely on the federal government for protection, and the NYPD needed to enhance its efforts.

Meanwhile, Hassan said he served in Iraq in 2003 to stop the atrocities of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's secret police. "I did not know they had one across the Hudson," says Hassan, referring to the NYPD's intelligence division.

California-based Muslim Advocates, a civil rights organization that meets regularly with representatives of the Obama administration, is representing the plaintiffs in the case for free. "The NYPD program is founded upon a false and constitutionally impermissible premise: that Muslim religious identity is a legitimate criterion for selection of law-enforcement surveillance targets," the lawsuit claims.

Lawmakers in NJ were outraged early this year when they learnt of the NYPD's surveillance, however, after a three-month review, the state's attorney general found that the NYPD did not violate any state laws when it spied on Muslim neighborhoods and organizations. The attorney general found no recourse for the state of NJ to stop the NYPD from infiltrating Muslim student groups, videotaping mosque-goers or collecting their license plate numbers as they prayed. No court has ruled that the NYPD programs were illegal.

Moiz Mohammed, a 19-year-old sophomore at Rutgers University said he was moved to join the lawsuit after reading reports that the NYPD had conducted surveillance of Muslim student groups at colleges across the Northeast, including his own. He said the revelations had made him nervous to pray in public or engage in lively debates with fellow students - a practice he said he once most enjoyed about the college atmosphere. "It's such an unfair thing going on: Here I am, I am an American citizen, I was born here, I am law abiding, I volunteer in my community, I have dialogues and good relationships with Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and the NYPD here is spying on people like me?" says Mohammed. "We feel as though it was a violation of our constitutional and our civil and our human rights," said Abdul Kareem Muhammad, another plaintiff in the case. Muhammad is the imam of the Newark mosque, Masjid al-Haqq, one of the mosques listed and pictured in a September 2007 NYPD report on Newark.