[Peace-discuss] University of Illinois and Homeland Security

[Roger Epperson]

What is the possible relationship between the
University of Illinois and the Department of Homeland
Security? That question, of university involvement in
the "war on terror," is explored in an article
entitled: Repress U How to Build a Homeland Security
Campus in Seven Steps by Michael Gould-Wartofsky.  The
complete article, including an update on taser
technology, is available at: www.tomdispatch.com  An 
excerpt follows here:

>From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it
into the Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation
Notice" system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying
program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential
terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense
itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act
requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific
TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the U.S.
-- some listed as "credible threats" --- from student
groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz,
State University of New York, Georgia State
University, and New Mexico State University, among
other campuses.

At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police
officers now double as full-time FBI agents and,
according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve
on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task
Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked
on student activists' doors from North Carolina State
to the University of Colorado and, in one case,
interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.

FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to
do all the work themselves. Administrators often do it
for them, setting up "free speech zones," which
actually constrain speech, and punishing those who
step outside them. Last year, protests were typically
forced into "free assembly areas" at the University of
Central Florida and Clemson University; while students
at Hampton and Pace Universities faced expulsion for
handing out antiwar flyers, aka "unauthorized
materials."

2. Lock and load: Many campus police departments are
morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a
wide array of weaponry from Taser stun guns and pepper
guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles.
Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under
the rubric of "the war on crime" only escalated with
the President's Global War on Terror. Each school
shooting -- most recently the massacre at Virginia
Tech -- just adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities now arm their police,
according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns
being purchased were previously in the province of
military units and SWAT teams. For instance, AR-15
rifles (similar to M-16s) are now in the arsenal of
the University of Texas campus police. Last April,
City University of New York bought dozens of
semiautomatic handguns. Now, states like Nevada are
even considering plans to allow university staff to
pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."

Most of the force used on campus these days, though,
comes in "less lethal" form, such as the rubber
bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to
contain student demonstrations. Then there is the
ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently
ruled a "form of torture" by the UN. A Taser was used
by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after
shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to
produce his ID at the Powell Library. Last September,
a University of Florida student was Tased after asking
pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public
forum, his plea of "Don't Tase me, bro" becoming the
stuff of pop folklore.

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on
campus: Surveillance has become a boom industry
nationally -- one that now reaches deep into the heart
of the American campus. In fact, universities have
witnessed explosive growth in the electronic
surveillance of students, faculty, and campus workers.
On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras
can track people's every move, often from hidden or
undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.

The International Association of Campus Law
Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance
cameras have now found their way onto at least half of
all colleges, their numbers on any given campus
doubling, tripling, and in a few cases, rising tenfold
since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have
proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in
particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for
instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while
Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.

Elsewhere, it can be tricky just to find out where the
cameras are and what they're meant to be viewing. The
University of Texas, for example, battled student
journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its
cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, a camera's purpose
seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a
professor in the Department of Animal Biotechnology at
the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005, the
widely respected professor found a hidden camera
redirected to monitor his office.

4. Mine student records: Student records have, in
recent years, been opened up to all manner of data
mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment, or
just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an
operation code-named "Project Strike Back," the
Department of Education teamed up with the FBI to
scour the records of the 14 million students who
applied for federal financial aid each year. The
objective? "To identify potential people of interest,"
explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially
those linked to "potential terrorist activity."

Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006,
days after students at Northwestern University blew
its cover. But just one month later, the Education
Department's Commission on the Future of Higher
Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report,
recommended the creation of a federal "unit record"
database that would track the activities and studies
of college students nationwide. The Department's
Institute of Education Sciences has developed a
prototype for such a national database.

It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part,
hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for
its overstretched, overstressed forces. In fact, the
Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own database
for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising
Market Research and Studies, this program now tracks
30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a
Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has partnered with
private marketing and data mining firms, which, in
turn, sell the government reams of information on
students and other potential recruits.

5. Track foreign-born students, keep the undocumented
out: Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students
and their dependents through the Student and Exchange
Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October
2007, ICE reported that it was actively following
713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more
than 4.7 million names in its database.

The database aims to amass and record information on
foreign students throughout their stay inside the
United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the
students from the sponsoring schools, constantly
updated with all academic, biographical, and
employment records -- all of which will be shared with
other government agencies. If students fall out of
"status" at school -- or if the database thinks they
have -- the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes
into action.

ICE has also done its part to keep the homeland
security campus purified of those not born in the
homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation
estimates that only one in 20 undocumented immigrants
who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a
college. Many don't go because they cannot afford the
tuition, but also because they have good reason to be
afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did
make it to college, some before they could graduate.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom, and the
laboratory: Needless to say, not every student is
considered a homeland security threat. Quite the
opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen
as potential assets. To exploit these assets, the
Department of Homeland Security has launched its own
curriculum under its Office of University Programs
(OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland
security culture within the academic community."

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439
federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003,
providing full tuition to students who fit "within the
homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred
twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate
programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that
encompasses over 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some
of the key players in creating the homeland security
classroom are the U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) and
the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the
Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and
laboratories to "align scientific results with
homeland security priorities." In Fiscal Year 2008
alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to
homeland security-related research. Grants correspond
with 16 research topics selected by DHS, based on
presidential directives, legislation, and a smattering
of scientific advice.

But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six
of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research
facilities that span dozens of universities from coast
to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the
Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown
Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in
October. The Center is mandated to assist a National
Commission in combating those "adopting or promoting
an extremist belief system
 to advance political,
religious or social change."

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course,
homeland security is not just a department, nor is it
simply a new network of surveillance and data mining
-- it's big business. (According to USA Today, global
homeland-security-style spending had already reached
$59 billion a year in 2006, a six-fold increase over
2000.)

Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent
years, established unprecedented private-sector
partnerships with the corporations that have the most
to gain from their research. The Department of
Homeland Security's on-campus National Consortium for
the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
(START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its
advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and
Defense relies on an industry working group that
includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance
and direction," according to its chair.

While vast sums of money are flowing in from these
corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out
into "strategic supplier contracts" with private
contractors, as universities permanently outsource
security operations to big corporations like Securitas
and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes
to those guarding the properties, who are often among
the most underpaid workers at universities. Instead,
it fills the corporate coffers of those with little
accountability for conditions on campus.

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate
relationships with private-security outfits like the
notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the
University of Illinois and its police training
institute cut a deal with the firm to share their
facilities and training programs with Blackwater
operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the
director of the campus program at the time was on the
Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education,
such collaboration is apparently par for the course.

Following these seven steps over the past six years,
the homeland security state and its constituents have
come a long way in their drive to remake the American
campus in the image of a compound on lockdown.
Somewhere, inside the growing homeland security state
that is our country, the next seven steps in the
process are undoubtedly already being planned out.

Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The
new homeland security campus has proven itself unable
to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to
its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes, such
opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled,
or the Pentagon's TALON de-clawed, or a Project Strike
Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest,
led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic
Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in
repression from Pace and Hampton, where the University
dropped its threats of expulsion, to UCLA, where
Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive
resisters.

Yet, if the tightening grip of the homeland security
complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher
education will be built not of ivory, but of Kevlar
for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.

* Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York
City and a recent graduate of the new homeland
security campus. He has written for the Nation Online,
Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson,
where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has
also appeared in Poets Against the War (Nation Books).
He was a recipient of the New York Times James B.
Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard's James
Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective
memory. This piece is also appearing in the latest
issue of the Nation Magazine.

© Copyright 2007 Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com




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