Thought Police

The FBI has a new plan to weed out divergent thoughts and control our minds.  In a story for AlterNet, Sarah Lazare reports on a plan by the FBI to spy on high school students across America, looking for signs of unorthodox ideologies.  It is "instructing" schools nationwide to report students who "criticize government policies" and speak against "Western corruption."

Ostensibly meant to spot signs of radicalization early and prevent terrorism, this makes any student suspect who has political views out of sync with the established, accepted modes of thought approved by the Party...I mean, by the Authorities.

Let us be clear, this new policy targets young Muslims, but it puts all of our young people at risk.  Among the views now included as suspicious are "anarchism," "animal rights extremism," and "environmental extremism."  This will strengthen the nefarious school-to-prison pipeline, and drags us a few steps closer to an Orwellian dystopia ala 1984.  Treating criticism with suspicion is an easy path to criminalizing dissent.  The Ministry of Love will be sending out its Thought Police any day now to ensure that we love Big Brother. The AlterNet article intervied Hugh Handeyside, staff attorney for the ACLU national security project, who speaks on the issue.

“Broadening the definition of violent extremism to include a range of belief-driven violence underscores that the FBI is diving head-first into community spying. Framing this conduct as ‘concerning behavior’ doesn’t conceal the fact that the FBI is policing students’ thoughts and trying to predict the future based on those thoughts.”

This would not be the first time the FBI curtailed our civil liberties in the name of security.  As early as 1946, J Edgar Hoover was compiling lists of American suspected of disloyalty, and in 1950, proposed a plan to suspend habeas corpus to detain over 12,000 Americans.  In the 60s through 1971 J. Edgar Hoover ran major campaigns against the civil rights movement, including both Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party with his Counter Intelligenge Protocol (COINTELPRO).  Hoover was famously quoted saying that "justice is incidental to law and order."

Since 9/11, the FBI has had unprecedented leeway in compiling information about American citizens in the name of national security.  The Patriot Act, the controversial domestic spying law made us a surveillance nation, and multiple sources allege that our civil liberties have been repeatedly violated ever since.  A report by the EFF claims that the FBI may have committed over 40,000 such violations between 2001 and 2008.  This included approximately 800 confirmed and reported violations of the law, executive order, or regulations regarding the acquisition of information.  Of these, about 150 were violations of Constitutional protections, FISA, or other laws governing intelligence gathering.  The EFF believes these 800 confirmed cases to be an underrepresentation.  Additionally, the report includes some 7000 more incidents the FBI claims were "potential" violations of civil liberties.  By extrapolation, the EFF reaches their estimate of 40,000 instances of misconduct.

The truth is that we don't know how often or how severely the FBI currently violates our rights, or to what degree such even exist any more.  However, it isn't hard to see that this new procedure, left unchallenged, would exacerbate an already tense issue, and put the heat to evaporating privacy rights.

I oppose the marginalizing of, and the casting of aspersions upon those who express alternate viewpoints.  We should not face suspicion for calling a spade a spade, and pointing out corruption where we see it.  Criticism of the government is not a dangerous act, it is our civic duty.  This policy is shameful.