Bad government has been good business during the Bush administration. In 1999, nine companies had federal homeland security contracts. Today the total is over 33,000. “Much of what we’ve seen touted by vendors after 9/11,” says security consultant Doug Laird, “is nothing more than a sales force trying to use 9/11 as the hype to get poorly advised folks to buy their products.”
But mismanagement and graft are just part of the story. Telecom companies’ involvement in illegal government spying, outsourcing of torture to contractors, Haliburton constructed jails for mass detentions in the event of an “immigration emergency”—are just some examples of public/private partnerships in which the private sector has a special role in advancing abuses of government power.
Matthew Rothschild’s recent story in The Progressive reveals that the private sector now plays an integral role in the transformation of America into an “endemic surveillance society” (h/t Marshall Kirkpatrick).
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government …
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm…
“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”
In other countries, for decades, cooperation between US industries and government has gone much further. In Argentina, for example, the Ford Falcon automobile is emblematic (PDF) of government terror. In the 1970s,
the Ford Falcon was the car of choice used by police, military and paramilitaries alike. Ford’s exclusive contracts with the Argentine security forces throughout the dictatorship eventually made the Falcon the single most recognizable icon of repression, one that clearly still resonates today. “Whenever a Falcon drove by or slowed down, we all knew that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder,” reflects renowned Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky in a recent article. “It was the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.”
The terror has continued into the present:
At noon on March 4, 2005, a green Ford Falcon pulled up next to a woman in Centenario, a municipality of Neuquén, in southern Argentina. Three men and a woman forced her into the car and then spent the next several hours threatening, torturing and mutilating her. The victim, whose name has been kept secret, was the wife of an employee at the Cerámica Zanon tile factory, one of the flagship worker-controlled enterprises that have sprung up in Argentina since the 2001 crisis. While the Zanon workers have successfully resuscitated the plant, they have also faced growing intimidation, as exemplified by this attack. The victim’s abductors released her with the message: “This is for Zanon. Tell them that the union will run with blood…. You’re all going to have to move into the factory because we’re going to kill all of you.”
Ford in Argentina is just one example among many. Coca Cola, to name another, has a long, insidious history in Columbia of contracting paramilitary forces that have murdered and tortured union activists.
In Latin America it is clear that these partnerships are part of an explicit war on organized labor and the culture that grew from developmentalist economies (PDF) in the 1950s and 60s. And a further crackdown on US labor may also be the promise of InfraGard.
FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005…. “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”
Outside the US, American corporations are in many ways independent entities not bound by US laws or by the laws of the countries where they operate. Increasingly, there is a class of American citizens who enjoy similar status within the US boarders.
One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.
The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”
InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.
“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”
On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.
“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”
Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”
Worse, there are indications that this special class of citizens may be the enforcers of martial law, with permission to shoot to kill.
One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.
This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.
“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.
“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.
Rothschild has substantial confirmation of this report from two other sources, as well.
Often using unreliable informants and guilt by association, the mid-20th century US government placed large numbers of its citizens on the Security Index, which qualified them to lose their rights and be rounded up and jailed en masse, upon declaration of martial law. Even if the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index, it was nearly impossible to have one’s name removed from the lists of those to be imprisoned without charges—unless one agreed to inform on others.
The canceled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained “potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases.” These cards would be destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or “otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups.”
(Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)
The odd twist of InfraGard is to recruit informants through the promise of placing them above the law rather than through threatening them with a possible loss of their rights.
At least through the mid-1960s, predominantly working class Klansmen enjoyed relative impunity as they murdered, bombed, burned, raped, shot and beat Blacks and their allies to maintain a social and economic order that kept them—the violent whites—poor as well.
Today, it seems the mantle of violence with impunity is being handed to an owning class elite.
To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation….
Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”
It’s the Good Ol’ Boys Network 2.0—enlisted for the class war. Look, they’re even on Facebook.
[Cross-posted on the Dollars & Sense blog.]
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 19, 2008 at 2:11 am
[This post is the the third in a series (1, 2).]
Like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I want it all.
I want my data to be free, I want to be in control of it and I want to have control over my privacy as well. Is that too much to ask? The watchdog group Privacy International released their annual report today about privacy around the world and put the US in the lowest category – “endemic surveillance societies.” Can we figure out how we can minimize surveillance while balancing privacy and the incredible opportunities that come from making at least some of our data open?
In the background of Marshall’s overview of contemporary privacy issues are discussions of our “post-privacy era.” Chris Messina, who has been involved in developing standards and technologies for handling personal data on the internet, writes:
My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!)
Still … there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep…
I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly.
The history of the US government’s surveillance of its own citizens says to me that privacy has actually always been an illusion. Old FBI files show the government maintaining decades worth of minutia on people’s affiliations and associations. For example, in close to 1000 pages of FBI documents that I have on the Greater NY Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the early 1960s (when my father was the Executive Director), for practically every person mentioned there are lists of political meetings they were known to have attended and organizations they had been members of, often dating back to the 1940s.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 20, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that among hundreds of recently declassified intelligence documents from the 1950s was a 1950 proposal by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty….
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
The revelation was noted briefly by a couple of major blogs and discussed at some length by smintheus at DailyKos. All have been quick to note the parallels between Hoover’s attempt to suspend Habeas Corpus and the current travails of our fair and essential writ. Both the NY Times and smintheus emphasize that there is no evidence Hoover’s plan was approved.
Smintheus argues that horrible though it was that Truman created loyalty boards, it was to preempt
something even more abusive of civil liberties. Truman also feared that something truly evil might be stirred up by Hoover, whom he loathed. Truman told Clark Clifford on May 2, 1947 that he “wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo’”. Truman believed, rightly I think, that Hoover had assembled enough dirt on members of Congress that they would give in to almost any of Hoover’s demands. In fact within hours of taking the oath of office in 1945, the President had his eye on the manipulative Hoover (Hoover had sent over to the White House a young FBI agent from Truman’s home town, to chat the new President up).
So the background to this notorious decision from 1947 illustrates that Truman, far from indifferent to the Bill of Rights, instead believed that he was fighting as best he could on its behalf. His profound skepticism of the FBI Director was both a personal as well as a politically savvy judgment. For all his faults (including cronyism, occasional ineptitude, stubbornness), Truman was at least a very sharp, self-reflective, and principled man. Such a person has the potential to rise above his times.
The impression one gets from reading the Times and smintheus is that though those were dark times, we averted something potentially much worse, in no small part because of Truman’s leadership.
Smintheus may be correct about Truman’s motive and strategy, but I don’t think halting mass detentions actually ameliorates the dangerousness of Hoover’s activities. Then and now, the news that the mass detentions did not occur is something of a red herring.
Actually, Hoover’s proposed suspension of Habeas Corpus and mass detentions is not news. The document reported on in the NY Times is new, but the plans have been known since The Church Committee’s famous 1976 Congressional report on “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
Mass detentions—as well as illegal surveillance practices by the NSA—should be vigorously opposed, of course. But the fundamental problem is data mining as an approach to intelligence. Data mining is the basis for mass detentions and the emphasis on data mining as a method leads to illegal surveillance activities.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 29, 2007 at 2:00 am
Maybe I’m being grumpy, but this Labor Day blog post by Seth Godin (via Matt) really rubbed me the wrong way.
Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year career at a slaughterhouse. Now that’s hard work.
The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your family.
Those days are long gone. Most of us don’t use our bodies as a replacement for a machine — unless we’re paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting that we’re likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the cooler.
Godin’s post is not really in the spirit of Labor Day: it’s an individualistic meditation on the meaning of “hard work” by a wealthy businessman. Godin uses the example of a worker injured on the job as a foil for his musings on how these days “hard work” is no longer risky manual labor but rather readiness of entrepreneurs to take risks that are shrewd and visionary.
Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.
You might be wondering why I am even reading this stuff. Back in 2004, when I was an underemployed PhD program dropout trying to parley my activism and my communication skills (blogging, academic research, poetry writing, English teaching) into some kind of professional life, I asked my friend Adina for some books to read that would help me understand trends in internet communications and online activism. One of the books Adina recommended was Seth Godin’s highly influential Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers. I learned a lot from the book—and I doubt I’ll ever read any other books in the marketing guru genre.
Anyway, there are two things I want to say to Godin’s notions of “hard work.”
- The fate of the worker in Fast Food Nation is not a freakish anomaly in American worklife.
Godin should spend an hour or two reading the archives of Confined Space, Jordan Barab’s excellent, now sadly defunct blog on workplace safety. In his farewell post, Barab wrote:
More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices.
And you’ll never learn from the evening news that we have more fish and wildlife inspectors than OSHA inspectors, or that the penalties from a chemical release that kills fish is higher than a chemical release that kills a worker. Not many are aware that workers are often afraid to complain about health and safety hazards or file a complaint with OSHA. Almost no one understands that OSHA inspections are so infrequent and penalties for endangering workers are so insignificant that there is almost no disincentive for employers to break the law. Employers are almost never criminally prosecuted for killing workers even when they knew they were violating OSHA standards.
- The supposed evolution of work conditions from the turn of the century, when my great-grandfather organized his fellow shochetim (ritual slaughterers) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is a myth. Over the last few decades, the realms of dangerous, unregulated, “hard” work have been expanding.
Siobhán McGrath and Nina Martin have written an extensive study (PDF) of this trend in American work. They also published a shorter version of their findings (PDF) in Dollars & Sense Magazine.
While many people are familiar with the conditions faced by garment workers and construction day laborers, the tentacles of unregulated work stretch into many other sectors of the economy,
including workplaces as diverse as restaurants, grocery stores, security companies, nail salons, laundries, warehouses, manufacturers, building services firms, and home health care agencies.
We have documented considerable variety in how employers violate laws. They pay their workers less than minimum wage, fail to pay them overtime, refuse to pay them for all hours worked, or
simply don’t pay them at all. They disregard health and safety regulations by imposing unsafe conditions, forcing employees to work without providing necessary safety equipment, and failing to give training and information. The list of ways employers break the law goes on: they refuse to pay Unemployment Insurance or Workers’ Compensation; they discriminate against workers on the basis of race, gender and immigration status; they retaliate against attempts to organize; they refuse medical leaves. Such stories of substandard working conditions may sound familiar—they carry strong echoes of the experiences of workers at the beginning of the last century. At that time, the solution was to pass laws to create wage minimum standards, protect workers who speak up for their rights, and eventually, guarantee workplace safety and outlaw discrimination. That these very laws are now being so widely violated poses new challenges. While efforts to pass new laws
raising workplace standards are still critical, a new battle has emerged to ensure that existing laws are enforced.
What Explains Unregulated Work?
The rise of unregulated work is closely tied to many of the same factors that are thought to be responsible for declining wages and job security in key sectors of the economy. Over the last 30 years, for example, global economic competition has been extinguishing the prospects of workers in manufacturing. Local manufacturers struggle to drive down their costs in order to compete against firms located in Asian or Latin American countries where wages and safety standards are lower.
Yet unregulated work cannot be explained simply as a byproduct of globalization. It’s true that the competitive pressure felt in manufacturing may ripple through other parts of the economy, as wage floors are lowered and the power of labor against capital is diminished. But we found businesses that serve distinctly local markets—such as home cleaning companies, grocery stores, and nail salons—engaging in a range of illegal work practices, even though they are insulated from global competition.
Declining unionization rates since the 1970’s also contribute to the spread of unregulated labor. One effect has been a general rise in inequality accompanied by lower wages and workplace standards: a weaker labor movement has less influence on the labor market as a whole, and offers less protection for both unionized and non-union workers. More directly, union members are more likely to report workplace violations to the relevant government authority than nonunion workers, as a number of studies have shown. So it makes sense that employers are increasingly committing such violations in the wake of a long-term decline in the percentage of workers in unions.
But even the powerful one-two punch of globalization and de-unionization provides only a partial explanation. Government policy is also instrumental in shaping unregulated work—not only employment policies per se, but also immigration, criminal justice, and welfare “reform” policies that create pools of vulnerable workers. In this environment employers can use a variety of illegal and abusive cost-cutting strategies. Perhaps most significantly, they are deciding whether or not to break the law in an era of declining enforcement, when they are likely to face mild penalties or no penalties at all.
For some related reading, I also suggest another article from Dollars & Sense, “The Rise of Migrant Militancy,” by Immanuel Ness.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 4, 2007 at 1:44 am
The Black Commentator’s Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build “temporary detention facilities” in case of an “immigration emergency.”
The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.
Kimberly quotes the passage, above, from Halliburton’s press release and then comments:
Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, “What immigration emergency?” If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won’t stop with them.
What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.
When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of “enemy combatants” these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.
Kimberly hopes for the “best case scenario” in which “this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America,” but she also entertains the more likely possibility that “our government is planning to create more [Jose] Padillas.” I say “more likely” because history suggests this development is nothing less than a revival of J. Edgar Hoover’s Emergency Detention Program, detailed in a 1976 Congressional report:
The development of plans during this period for emergency detention of dangerous persons and for intelligence about such persons took place entirely within the executive branch. In contrast to the employee security program, these plans were not only withheld from the public and Congress but were framed in terms which disregarded the legislation enacted by Congress. Director Hoover’s decision to ignore Attorney General Biddle’s 1943 directive abolishing the wartime Custodial Detention List had been an example of the inability of the Attorney General to control domestic intelligence operations. In the 1950s the FBI and the Justice Department collaborated in a decision to disregard the attempt by Congress to provide statutory direction for the Emergency Detention Program. This is not to say that the Justice Department itself was fully aware of the FBI’s activities in this area. The FBI kept secret from the Department its most sweeping list of potentially dangerous persons, first called the “Communist Index” and later renamed the “Reserve Index,” as well as its targeting programs for intensive investigation of “key figures” and “top functionaries” and its own detention priorities labeled “Detcom” and “Comsab”(emphasis added).
Director Hoover advised Attorney General Clark in March 1946 of the existence of its Security Index, although he did not say that it had existed since Attorney General Biddle’s 1943 directive. The Index listed persons “who would be dangerous or potentially dangerous in the event of . . . serious crisis, involving the United States and the U.S.S.R.” The Justice Department then prepared a memorandum concluding that the available options for action in an emergency were a declaration of martial law or suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The FBI Director recommended going to Congress to secure “statutory backing for detention” (emphasis added).
After a conference between Department and FBI officials, the FBI submitted a lengthy analysis of its standards for classifying potentially dangerous persons. The memorandum gave specific examples of “Communists and Communist sympathizers whose names appear in the Bureau’s Security Index.” However, the FBI did not provide any specific examples in the category “Espionage Suspects and Government Employees in Communist Underground.” Assistant Director Ladd advised Director Hoover of the reason for excluding any such examples:
The Bureau has identified over 100 persons who are logically suspected of being in the Government Communist Underground; however, at the present time, the Bureau does not have evidence, whether admissible or otherwise, reflecting actual membership in the Communist Party. It is believed that for security reasons, examples of these logical suspects should not be set forth at this time. (emphasis added)
The Director noted, “I most certainly agree. There are too many leaks.”
This past week there was a related revelation about a central repository of alleged terrorism suspects (via Julius Speaks):
The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.
The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center – created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency – contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed.
The keeping of large lists of “suspects” is also part of the Hoover heritage. The Custodial Detention List was established in the early 1940s, abolished by Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1943, and immediately re-invented by Hoover as the Security Index, which was maintained through the early 1970s, when it was re-named as the Administrative Index. At each stage in the game, there were subsidiary indices—such as the Communist Index, the Reserve Index and the Agitator Index—less well-known to the Attorney General and Congressional oversight committees. The 1976 Congressional report states that
By early 1951, the total had increased to 13,901 names [on the Security Index] as the result of an FBI decision after the outbreak of the Korean War to broaden “the basis for inclusion in the Security Index to include alI active members of the Communist Party.” The size of the Communist Index, as contrasted with the Security Index, was indicated by the figures from the New York field office which had 2,897 names on the Security Index and 42,000 names on the Communist Index. Since the Communist Index was based on “allegations of Communist activity,” it was “a measure of investigations performed.” If this proportion applied “throughout the field,” as the FBI memorandum suggested, then the Communist Indexes in the field offices contained over 200,000 names.
The Bush administration says we should take some comfort in knowing that US citizens comprise “only a very, very small fraction” of the 325,00 names in the National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository. “The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.,” a Bush administration official said.
The comments of ACLU legislative counsel for privacy rights, Timothy Sparapani, are more to the point:
We have lists that are having baby lists at this point, they’re spawning faster than rabbits…. If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we’ve got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case.
The existence of these over-swollen lists is evidence of what the new, Halliburton-built detention centers are intended for. The development of an infrastructure for mass detentions does not come out of the blue. It has long been a desired power of the federal law enforcement. Even in 1974, after many of these earlier programs came to light and the Attorney General demanded more precise “guidelines” for how security lists would be maintained, the 1976 Congressional report concluded that “the broad claims of power in the hands of the Executive branch could readily permit a return to the vague and overbroad domestic intelligence policies of the past.”
And readily permit a return they have.
FURTHER READING
FOX Unleashes Vile McCarthyite Smear Campaign Against Cindy and the Peace Movement
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 19, 2006 at 10:51 am
[If you are in the Boston area and are free tomorrow afternoon, come support this action. --BG]
Join us as we gather 400 supporters to represent the number of Massachusetts high school graduates every year who are denied access to higher education.
Let’s show the legislature that the everyone deserves the right to an education.
The event will run from 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM and be held at the Grand Staircase.
Get more information
To RSVP, please contact Carlos Saavedra at csaavedra AT miracoalition DOT org
(From the information link, above:)
The Issue
Each year around 400 hundred high achieving students, who have lived in Massachusetts for most of their lives, are unable to pursue higher education because of their immigration status. Currently, students without permanent legal status must pay out of state tuition to attend state and city universities and colleges. Out of state tuition is three to five times the cost of in state tuition. As most of these students cannot afford to pay out of state tuition, they are forced to forego college and work in low-paying, low-skilled jobs.
The In-State Tuition Bill S. 764/ H. 1230
The bill allows students to pay the same in-state tuition rates as their peers at public colleges and universities provided they have attended a Massachusetts high school for three years and have graduated or received the equivalent of a diploma. If the student is not a legal permanent resident, they must sign an affidavit stating that they have filed an application to become a legal permanent resident, or will file an application as soon as they are eligible to do so.
Current Status
New Mexico, Texas, Utah, California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Kansas and Oklahoma have already passed similar bills. Governor Romney vetoed the bill in Massachusetts in June 2004. This session the bill was reported favorably out of the House Ways and Means Committee and is currently awaiting a full vote on the House floor. Governor Romney is expected to once again veto the bill, therefore we need a 2/3rds majority in the House to move forward. We are currently counting votes and urging House leadership to bring the bill up for a full floor vote.
Also see this, which explains that nationally “approximately 65,000 undocumented students . . . graduate from high school every year without the opportunity to go to college.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 24, 2005 at 3:35 pm
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