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<font size=4><b> Repress U, Class of 2012<br>
Seven Steps to a Homeland Security Campus<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175519/tomgram:_michael_gould-wartofsky,_class_of_2012_meet_the_class_of_1984/#more" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175519/tomgram%3A_michael_gould-wartofsky%2C_class_of_2012_meet_the_class_of_1984/#more<br>
</a></font> By Michael Gould-Wartofsky<br><br>
Campus spies. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter
trackers. Biometrics. Student security consultants. Professors of
homeland security studies. Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012.<br><br>
Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to
campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of
work and its houses of worship, its public space and its
cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival
on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere -- until, that
is, the “less lethal” weapons were unleashed in the fall of
2011.<br><br>
Today, from the City University of New York to the
University of California, students increasingly find themselves on the
frontlines, not of a war on terror, but of a war on “radicalism” and
“extremism.” Just about everyone from college administrators and
educators to law enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to
have enlisted in this war effort. Increasingly, American students
are in their sights.<br><br>
In 2008, I laid out seven steps the Bush
administration had taken to create a homeland security campus. Four
years and a president later, Repress U has come a long way. In the
Obama years, it has taken seven more steps to make the university safe
for plutocracy. Here is a step-by-step guide to how they did
it.<br><br>
1. Target Occupy<br><br>
Had there been no UC Davis, no Lt. John Pike, no
chemical weapons wielded against peacefully protesting students, and no
cameras to broadcast it all, Americans might never have known just how
far the homeland security campus has come in its mission to police its
students. In the old days, you might have called in the National
Guard. Nowadays, all you need is an FBI-trained, federally funded,
and “less lethally” armed campus police department.<br><br>
The mass pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis was
only the most public manifestation of a long-running campus trend in
which, for officers of the peace, the pacification of student protest has
become part of the job description. The weapons of choice have
sometimes been blunt instruments, such as the extendable batons used to
bludgeon the student body at Berkeley, Baruch, and the University of
Puerto Rico. At other times, tactical officers have turned to
“less-lethal” munitions, like the CS gas, beanbag rounds, and pepper
pellets fired into crowds at Occupy protests across the University of
California system this past winter.<br><br>
Yet for everything we see of the homeland security
campus, there is a good deal more that we miss. Behind the riot
suits, the baton strikes, and the pepper-spray cannons stands a sprawling
infrastructure made possible by multimillion-dollar federal grants,
“memoranda of understanding” and “mutual aid” agreements among law
enforcement agencies, counter-terrorism training, an FBI-sponsored
“Academic Alliance,” and 103 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (which provide
“one-stop shopping” for counterterrorism operations to more than 50
federal and 600 state and local agencies).<br><br>
“We have to go where terrorism takes us, so we often
have to go onto campuses,” FBI Special Agent Jennifer Gant told Campus
Safety Magazine in an interview last year. To that end, campus
administrators and campus police chiefs are now known to coordinate their
operations with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “special advisors,”
FBI “campus liaison agents,” an FBI-led National Security Advisory Board,
and a Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which instructs local law
enforcement in everything from “physical techniques” to “behavioral
science.” More than half of campus police forces already have
“intelligence-sharing agreements” with these and other government
agencies in place.<br><br>
2. Get a SWAT team<br><br>
Since 2007, campus police forces have decisively
escalated their tactics, expanded their arsenals, and trained ever more
of their officers in SWAT-style paramilitary policing. Many
agencies acquire their arms directly from the Department of Defense
through a surplus weapons sales program known as “1033,” which offers,
among other things, “used grenade launchers (for the deployment of less
lethal weapons)... for a significantly reduced cost.”<br><br>
According to the most recent federal data available,
nine out of 10 campus agencies with sworn police officers now deploy
armed patrols authorized to use deadly force. Nine in 10 also
authorize the use of chemical munitions, while one in five make regular
use of Tasers. Last August, an 18-year old student athlete died
after being tased at the University of Cincinnati.<br><br>
Meanwhile, many campus police squads have been
educated in the art of war through regular special weapons training
sessions by “tactical officers’ associations” which run a kind of SWAT
university. In October, UC Berkeley played host to an “Urban
Shield” SWAT training exercise involving local and campus agencies, the
California National Guard, and special police forces from Israel, Jordan,
and Bahrain. And since 2010, West Texas A&M has played host to
paramilitary training programs for police from Mexico.<br><br>
In October, the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte got its very own SWAT team, equipped with MP-15 rifles, M&P
40 sidearms, and Remington shotguns. “We have integrated SWAT
officers into the squads that serve our campus day and night,” boasted
UNC Charlotte Chief of Police Jeff Baker. The following month, in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a SWAT team staged an armed raid on an
occupied building, pointing assault rifles at the heads of activists,
among them UNC students.<br><br>
3. Spy on Muslims<br><br>
The long arm of Repress U stretches far beyond the
bounds of any one campus or college town. As reported by the Associated
Press this winter, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and its
hitherto secret “Demographics Unit” sent undercover operatives to spy on
members of the Muslim Students Association at more than 20 universities
in four states across the Northeast beginning in 2006.<br><br>
None of the organizations or persons of interest were
ever accused of any wrongdoing, but that didn’t stop NYPD detectives from
tracking Muslim students through a “Cyber Intelligence Unit,” issuing
weekly “MSA Reports” on local chapters of the Muslim Students
Association, attending campus meetings and seminars, noting how many
times students prayed, or even serving as chaperones for what they
described as “militant paintball trips.” The targeted institutions
ran the gamut from community colleges to Columbia and Yale.<br><br>
According to the AP’s investigation, the intelligence
units in question worked closely not only with agencies in other cities,
but with an agent on the payroll of the CIA. Police Commissioner
Ray Kelly, facing mounting calls to resign, has issued a spirited defense
of the campus surveillance program, as has Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“If terrorists aren't limited by borders and boundaries, we can't be
either,” Kelly said in a speech at Fordham Law School.<br><br>
The NYPD was hardly the only agency conducting covert
surveillance of Muslim students on campus. The FBI has been
engaging in such tactics for years. In 2007, UC Irvine student
Yasser Ahmed was assaulted by FBI agents, who followed him as he was on
his way to a campus “free speech zone.” In 2010, Yasir Afifi, a
student at Mission College in Santa Clara, California, found a secret GPS
tracking device affixed to his car. A half-dozen agents later
knocked on his door to ask for it back.<br><br>
4. Keep the undocumented out<br><br>
Foreign students are followed closely by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through its Student and Exchange Visitor
Information System (SEVIS). As of 2011, the agency was keeping tabs
on 1.2 million students and their dependents. Most recently, as
part of a transition to the paperless SEVIS II -- which aims to “unify
records” -- ICE has been linking student files to biometric and employer
data collected by DHS and other agencies.<br><br>
“That information stays forever,” notes Louis Farrell,
director of the ICE program. “And every activity that’s ever been
associated with that person will come up. That’s something that has
been asked for by the national security community... [and] the academic
community.”<br><br>
Then there are the more than 360,000 undocumented
students and high-school graduates who would qualify for permanent
resident status and college admission, were the DREAM Act ever
passed. It would grant conditional permanent residency to
undocumented students who were brought to the U.S. as children.
When such students started “coming out” as part of an “undocumented and
unafraid” campaign, many received DHS notices to appear for removal
proceedings. Take 24-year old Uriel Alberto, of Lees-McRae College,
who recently went on hunger strike in North Carolina’s Wake County jail;
he now faces deportation (and separation from his U.S.-born son) for
taking part in a protest at the state capitol.<br><br>
Since 2010, the homeland security campus has been
enlisted by the state of Arizona to enforce everything from bans on
ethnic studies programs to laws like S.B. 1070, which makes it a crime to
appear in public without proof of legal residency and is considered a
mandate for police to detain anyone suspected of being
undocumented. Many undocumented students have turned down offers of
admission to the University of Arizona since the passage of the law,
while others have stopped attending class for fear of being detained and
deported.<br><br>
5. Keep an eye on student spaces and social
media<br><br>
While Muslim and undocumented students are particular
targets of surveillance, they are not alone. Electronic
surveillance has expanded beyond traditional closed-circuit TV cameras to
next-generation technologies like IQeye HD megapixel cameras, so-called
edge devices (cameras that can do their own analytics), and Perceptrak’s
video analytics software, which “analyzes video from security cameras
24x7 for events of interest,” and which recently made its debut at Johns
Hopkins University and Mount Holyoke College.<br><br>
At the same time, students’ social media accounts have
become a favorite destination for everyone from campus police officers to
analysts at the Department of Homeland Security.<br><br>
In 2010, the DHS National Operations Center
established a Media Monitoring Capability (MMC). According to an
internal agency document, MMC is tasked with “leveraging news stories,
media reports and postings on social media sites… for operationally
relevant data, information, analysis, and imagery.” The definition
of operationally relevant data includes “media reports that reflect
adversely on DHS and response activities,” “partisan or agenda-driven
sites,” and a final category ambiguously labeled “research/studies,
etc.”<br><br>
With the Occupy movement coming to campus, even
university police departments have gotten in on the action.
According to a how-to guide called “Essential Ingredients to Working with
Campus Protests” by UC Santa Barbara police chief Dustin Olson, the first
step to take is to “monitor social media sites continuously,” both for
intelligence about the “leadership and agenda” and “for any messages that
speak to violent or criminal behavior.”<br><br>
6. Coopt the classroom and the laboratory<br><br>
At a time when entire departments and disciplines are
facing the chopping block at America’s universities, the Department of
Homeland Security has proven to be the best-funded department of
all. Homeland security studies has become a major growth sector in
higher education and now has more than 340 certificate- and
degree-granting programs. Many colleges have joined the Homeland
Security and Defense Education Consortium, a spinoff of the U.S. Northern
Command (the Department of Defense’s “homeland defense” division), which
offers a model curriculum to its members.<br><br>
This emerging discipline has been directed and funded
to the tune of $4 billion over the last five years by DHS. The
goal, according to Dr. Tara O’Toole, DHS Undersecretary of Science &
Technology, is to “leverag[e] the investment and expertise of academia…
to meet the needs of the department.” Additional funding is being
made available from the Pentagon through its blue-skies research arm, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the “intelligence
community” through its analogous Intelligence Advanced Research Projects
Activity.<br><br>
At the core of the homeland security-university
partnership are DHS’s 12 centers of excellence. (A number that has
doubled since I first reported on the initiative in 2008.) The DHS
Office of University Programs advertises the centers of excellence as an
“extended consortium of hundreds of universities” which work together “to
develop customer-driven research solutions” and “to provide essential
training to the next generation of homeland security experts.”<br><br>
But what kind of research is being carried out at
these centers of excellence, with the support of tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars each year? Among the 41 “knowledge products”
currently in use by DHS or being evaluated in pilot studies, we find an
“extremist crime database,” a “Minorities at Risk for Organizational
Behavior” dataset, analytics for aerial surveillance systems along the
border, and social media monitoring technologies. Other research
focuses include biometrics, “suspicious behavior detection,” and “violent
radicalization.”<br><br>
7. Privatize, subsidize, and capitalize<br><br>
Repress U has not only proven a boon to hundreds of
cash-starved universities, but also to big corporations as higher
education morphs into hired education. While a majority of the $184
billion in homeland security funding in 2011 came from government
agencies like DHS and the Pentagon, private sector funding is expected to
make up an increasing share of the total in the coming years, according
to the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a consulting firm serving
the homeland security industry.<br><br>
Each DHS Center of Excellence has been founded on
private-public partnerships, corporate co-sponsorships, and the
leadership of “industry advisory boards” which give big business a direct
stake and say in its operations. Corporate giants allied with DHS Centers
of Excellence include:<br><br>
*Lockheed Martin at the Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), based at the University of
Maryland at College Park.<br><br>
*Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T at the Rutgers
University-based Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for
Advanced Data Analysis (CICADA).<br><br>
*ExxonMobil and Con Edison at the Center for Risk and
Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), based at the University
of Southern California.<br><br>
*Motorola, Boeing, and Bank of America at the Purdue
University-based Center for Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and
Interoperability Environments (VACCINE).<br><br>
*Wal-Mart, Cargill, Kraft, and McDonald’s at the
National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), based at the
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.<br><br>
What’s more, universities have struck
multimillion-dollar deals with multinational private security firms like
Securitas, deploying unsworn, underpaid, often untrained “protection
officers” on campus as “extra eyes and ears.” The University of
Wisconsin-Madison, in one report, boasts that police and private partners
have been “seamlessly integrated.”<br><br>
Elsewhere, even students have gotten into the business
of security. The private intelligence firm STRATFOR, for example,
recently partnered with the University of Texas to use its students to
“essentially parallel the work of… outside consultants” but on campus,
offering information on activist groups like the Yes Men.<br><br>
Step by step, at school after school, the homeland
security campus has executed a silent coup in the decade since September
11th. The university, thus usurped, has increasingly become an
instrument not of higher learning, but of intelligence gathering and
paramilitary training, of profit-taking on behalf of America’s
increasingly embattled “1%.”<br><br>
Yet the next generation may be otherwise
occupied. Since September 2011, a new student movement has swept
across the country, making itself felt most recently on March 1st with a
national day of action to defend the right to education. This
Occupy-inspired wave of on-campus activism is making visible what was
once invisible, calling into question what was once beyond question, and
counteracting the logic of Repress U with the logic of nonviolence and
education for democracy.<br><br>
For many, the rise of the homeland security campus has
provoked some basic questions about the aims and principles of a higher
education: Whom does the university serve? Whom does it protect? Who is
to speak? Who is to be silenced? To whom does the future belong?<br><br>
The guardians of Repress U are uninterested in such
inquiry. Instead, they cock their weapons. They lock the
gates. And they prepare to take the next step.<br><br>
Michael Alexander Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New
York City and a MacCracken Fellow in Sociology at New York
University. His writing has received Harvard’s James Gordon Bennett
Prize and the New York Times James B. Reston Award, and has appeared in
the Nation, the Harvard Crimson, The Huffington Post, and Monthly Review,
along with TomDispatch. He is currently writing a book about Occupy
Wall Street. His website is
<a href="http://www.michaelgouldwartofsky.com/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.michaelgouldwartofsky.com</a>.<br><br>
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us
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Copyright 2012 Michael Gould-Wartofsky<br><br>
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