Article first appeared in the
economicpolicyjournal:
California - I did have an interesting conversation with a salesman who sold night vision
goggles to police SWAT teams. He said most of the training was aimed at
battling terrorism. But then he added,
"You know, the greater San Francisco area
has more SWAT teams than any other part of the country."
SWAT,
an acronym for "Special Weapons And Tactics," describes a team of law
enforcement officers who are specifically trained to respond to
potential life threatening situations. SWAT teams use military-grade
weapons, ammunition and equipment to respond to hostage, terrorist, riot
and heavily armed criminal situations.
The salesman considered San Jose to the south and Berkeley to the east as part of the
greater San Francisco area. He told me that the University of California,
Berkeley has its own SWAT team and the he said, "Even Pittsburgh, California
has a SWAT team, what the hell is Pittsburgh, California and why do they need a
SWAT team?"
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.
University police donned black military-style fatigues
and, armed with automatic weapons, practiced how to rescue hostages from
armed assailants and how to capture barricaded gunmen.
The unit
will also be prepared for any potential trouble that might arise from
the visit of a controversial political figure. Like when Gerry Adams, the leader of the political wing of
the Irish Republican Army, spoke to students.
Although college
campuses have a lower crime rate than the nation over all,
law-enforcement officials say that in these times campus police must be
prepared for the most violent situations.
"Universities and
campuses are not enclaves that are immune to these kind of things," said
Chief Victoria L. Harrison of the university Police Department, which
has more than 80 members.
The department has trained about 10 officers for the special weapons
and tactics group, or the "special response unit," as it is called here.
Chief Harrison said the unit would be summoned for "any kind of
situation that requires an exceptional response," and for serving arrest
warrants in cases in which weapons might be involved.
I asked him what other cities had strong SWAT teams presence. He told me
the names you would expect, Chicago, New York Los Angeles. Just to jilt the
conversation a bit, I asked him about Miami. He said, "Nothing registers on the
radar, the same with Atlanta, not much going on."
The SWAT team conference he was attending was a regional event. There were
36 SWAT teams attending, 30 from the San Francisco region and a few
outliers,including a SWAT team from Israel.
UNC-Charlotte has its own SWAT team.
Why does the University of North Carolina-Charlotte need a
SWAT team? "Virginia Tech and Columbine," explains Lieutenant Josh Huffman of Campus Police.
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.
Radley Balko, a journalist who covers the militarization of police, says:
Any given middle school, high school, or college in America can expect to have exactly one homicide on its campus every 12,000 years.
So how long before the UNC-Charlotte SWAT team feels the need to
justify its existence by expanding its mission? I predict they’re
serving drug warrants and raiding frat houses within a year.
Ohio University has a certified SWAT team for the first time in its history, an important capability for a rural campus.
Five
members of the Ohio University Police Department, who also completed
active shooter training in July, are undergoing formal basic SWAT
education on campus and in various locations in the
surrounding area.
OUPD
Chief of Police Michael Martinsen recently created the SWAT team
because he wants his department to be prepared for any type of
emergency. Because of Athens' location, it would take between 60 to 90
minutes for the closest SWAT team to arrive on campus from Columbus.
"I
had the idea of a SWAT team before Virginia Tech happened, but that
incident confirmed my thoughts that we needed one," Martinsen said. "It
will enhance the department's ability to respond to a crisis. Our SWAT
team will be able to isolate a dangerous situation and move people away
from the threat until more help arrives."
The Radford University Police Department SWAT team is comprised of
highly trained officers who are dedicated to the safety of the RU
community and to the preservation of life.
"We've known for a while now that American neighborhoods are
increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of
war," said Kara Dansky, senior counsel at the ACLU's Center for
Justice, which is coordinating the investigation. "The aim of this
investigation is to find out just how pervasive this is, and to what
extent federal funding is incentivizing this trend."
SWAT teams & campus spies how DHS has taken over our universities:
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.”
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. An 18-year old student athlete died after being
tased at the University of Cincinnati.
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.
“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.”
Students’ social media accounts have become a favorite destination
for everyone from campus police officers to analysts at the Department
of Homeland Security.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Universities like
Harvard 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.”
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%.”
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?
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=4359
NSA-like surveillance on today's campuses:
The National Security Agency? Nope. It's your average college or university.
FIRE's Nico Perrino cites examples ranging from Montana to Occidental to Kentucky to Valdosta State to St. Augustine's College to Johns Hopkins, noting the prevalence of the anti-privacy pattern. Perrino leads by recalling events from earlier this year at Harvard, when university officials eventually confessed to having snooped on the e-mails of 16 house resident deans. The resident deans are officially members of Harvard's faculty, and the searches violated Harvard policies.
The searches came after media revelations of Harvard's largest cheating scandal in recent memory. At the time, then-Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds justified the searches on grounds that "we needed to act to protect our students." Yet at least some of the resident deans exposed to the improper searches were also Harvard students (resident deans are often advanced graduate students). And, in any case, the searches seemed motivated less by a desire to protect students than to find blame for who might have exposed a deeply embarrassing event for the university--two of the students caught up in the cheating scandal were members of Harvard's APR-challenged basketball team, a fact that got significant play in media coverage. (APR, or Academic Progress Rate, introduced by the NCAA, measures the likelihood of graduation by Division I athletes.)
When Harvard University
violated school policy by secretly searching deans' email accounts, the world glimpsed the intrusive measures one school took to monitor online activity of its staff. "We needed to act to protect our students,"
said then-dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds, who authorized the search in response to leaked information about a high-profile cheating scandal at the Ivy League institution.
Unlike the NSA, universities don't play any role in protecting our
national security. So the issue of privacy tradeoffs seems far less
relevant to any discussion of privacy rights at college. Yet the Harvard
episode--while extreme--is part of a troubling disregard of privacy on
contemporary campuses. "At schools across the country," Perrino
observes, "administrators use similarly invasive surveillance tools to
monitor everything from students' off-campus behavior to their online
speech."
But at schools across the country, administrators use similarly invasive surveillance tools to monitor everything from students' off-campus behavior to their online speech. University lawyers and administrators claim such surveillance programs are necessary to "protect" their stakeholders. But in reality, these actions are often just heavy-handed strategies colleges use to control their public image – at students' expense.
Many athletic departments hire companies like
UDiligence and
Varsity Monitor to watch after the social media profiles of their student athletes. The services search for keywords in athletes' profiles and alert coaches or administrators when they are used. Words or phrases like "Benjamins", "Sam Adams", and, bizarrely, "Gazongas" are among those
keywords flagged by the monitoring programs.
In 2007, Valdosta State University student Hayden Barnes
was expelled without
due process (pdf) for protesting University President Ronald Zaccari's plan to spend $30m of student fee money on building campus parking garages. Zaccari went to extreme lengths to mute Barnes' criticism: he monitored Barnes' Facebook page, ordered university staff to look into his health, and ultimately had an expulsion note slipped under his dorm room door that identified him as a "clear and present danger" to campus. (In 2012, the Eleventh Circuit US Court of Appeals
held Zaccari personally liable for violating Barnes' legal rights.)
In another brazen exercise of snooping and censorship, St Augustine's College (SAC) in North Carolina
punished student Roman Caple in 2011 for a Facebook post on the college's official page that, according to the school's vice president of student affairs, "jeopardized the integrity of the college". The offending post simply called for fellow students to "come correct, be prepared, and have supporting documents" at a public meeting where campus leaders were scheduled to discuss the school's response to a recent tornado that cut off power to many SAC students.
Lately, tracking student social media has gotten so out of control that Delaware and California have
passed legislation limiting schools' ability to do such monitoring.
But as we know from the Harvard imbroglio, the monitoring of online activity isn't limited to students. Last month, a professor at Johns Hopkins University wrote a blog post critical of the NSA and was asked to take it down and stop using the NSA logo by one of the school's deans. (The school later apologized.) And at Occidental College, administrators recently confiscated the computers and cell phones of at least eight faculty members and dozens of staff members allegedly as part of an ongoing investigation by the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) into campus sexual assault procedures. But in an interview with The Huffington Post, an OCR official said that "OCR did not require Occidental to confiscate faculty members' laptops and cells".
Nor is the monitoring of students' lives limited to what they do online. Presumably to ensure they don't miss those moments when students are away from their computers, administrators at the University of Kentucky (UK) released a plan to install 2,000 surveillance cameras on campus and give students new ID cards that will contain chips that can track student movements in and out of buildings.
In an interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, UK police Chief Joe Monroe said that the plan will give the school an "unprecedented capability for monitoring the campus for crime and protecting our students, employees and visitors". But as a spokeswoman for the ACLU of Kentucky told the Herald-Leader, the program is ripe for misuse depending how information is used and how long it is kept.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/22/online-social-media-surveillance-university-campuses
