TERROR JUNKIES TAKING OVER CAMPUSES

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MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY, NATION - From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower
is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror
warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and
homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of
Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that
traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel
is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the
campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the
cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice
organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's
Threat and Local Observation Notice system, a secretive domestic spying
program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist
threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered,
via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON
reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as
"credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California,
Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State
University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.. . .

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 "war on terror." Each
school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel
to the armament flames. . .

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 campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth
since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and
campus workers. . . The International Association of Campus Law
Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found
their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given
campus doubling, tripling or, 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. . .

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 Education Department
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.".
. .

5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the
auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students
. . . 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 the database.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. . . . DHS
has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs,
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." . .
.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080128&s=gould-wartofsky

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