[Peace-discuss] University of Illinois and Homeland Security

[Laurie at advancenet.net]

> What is the possible relationship between the
> University of Illinois and the Department of Homeland
> Security?

Well there was no Department of Homeland Security back then; but in the
1960's, the University of Illinois fully cooperated with the FBI and local
authorities is tracking dissidents and anti-war protesters, finding and
turning over draft dodgers, in setting up a free speech area away from
pedestrian traffic which was easily videoed and photographed by authorities,
and a number of other activities and policies similar to what is being
described.  Why would one expect that the U of I is not doing it now and in
spades?


> From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net [mailto:peace-discuss-
> bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Roger Epperson
> Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 12:46 PM
> To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] University of Illinois and Homeland Security
> 
> 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.
> 
> C Copyright 2007 Michael Gould-Wartofsky
> 
> Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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