A Threat to Campus Freedoms.
"In the 1970s Senate and House investigators established what many antiwar protesters and campus activists had believe for several years: that they were being watched and sometimes targeted by the governemtn, including the National Guard and the FBI."
"... domestic surveillance... may be returning, involving a more coordinated federal effort through the National Guard as well as Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), teams of state and local police and federal agents, led by the FBI."
Democratic [Is there such thing, anymore?] Senator Joseph Dunn (California State Senate) says, "Such controversial controversial directives could be coming from the Pentagon."
"'Just about every university in the country' has some connection to the JTTFs, according to an FBI spokesman in Texas."
"At the UMass in Amherst Campus the campus detective 'does everything an FBI agent on the JTTF would do, including working on non-university-related cases,' said an FBI official. In one case there involving the Internet that was unrelated to terrorism, the campus detective acted as a liason with a California FBI office."
- All of the above text is taken from "Spying on the Protestors" by John S. Friedman in the September Issue of The Nation.
Well, I'm not sure about you, but that doesn't make me feel good about our University. If you don't go to UMass, don't worry, there's a strong likelyhood that it's also happenning on your campus. We're selling off our hard fought civil rights due to a culture of fear in which we are supposed to feel that our trading of liberties for "safety" against an overblown, while real, threat of terrorism is held over us by government and country bent on imperial domination and the militaristic extension of it's empire.
This is excrutiatingly unsettling as it has settled directly on our home. I would like to have a serious discussion about protesting this activity on our campus. When our Universities and institutions of Higher Learning become the target of a spying paranoid government in an attempt to censor and intimidate us, especially when it is this close to home - we have to start a discussion. Our Universities will inevitably our last place to have an organized discussion and debate about the direction in which our country is currently heading.
You should be extremely scared by news like this.
This is a blatant disreguard for the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution - the document by which the entire country, no matter what section or high office, is supposed to abide by. It guarantees you such basic rights against unlimted search and seizure. Simply put, the federal government with the aid of local and national law-enforcement (ironic, no?) agencies are violating your privacy by taking measures which blatantly disreguard the very essence on which the country is founded and operated.
If we continue to sleepwalk while the governemnt overuns our freedoms, soon we will no longer have any sorts of freedoms.
A serious discussion on, at the very least, basic reforms nation wide, and the expulsion of such egregious uses of power this close to home must happen soon.
Let's get some thought rolling of how we can do that.
If you use LiveJournal please link this post. Spread the word. Critical Questioning of the world we live in has to start somewhere, and even if it's 10 kids on an obscure website - that's a start.