The FBI's New Plan to Spy on High School Students: Targets include Muslims, anarchists, activists

[Cheese Sandwich]

Targets to include Muslims, anarchists, environmental and animal rights activists.

Under new guidelines, Muslim students will be disproportionately targeted – but all young people will be suspect.

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.

Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s "Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools" guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

This overwhelming threat is then used to justify a massive surveillance apparatus, wherein educators and pupils function as extensions of the FBI by watching and informing on each other.

The FBI’s justification for such surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim to lead to acts of violent subversion, even if those people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model has been widely discredited as a violence prevention method, including by the U.S. government, but it is now being imported to schools nationwide as official federal policy.
...

more: http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/fbi-has-new-plan-spy-high-school-students-across-country

[noretreatnosurrender]

1. Creepy as hell

There are already reasons to be concerned about who will be most vulnerable under this mass surveillance plan. In what is popularly known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”, students of color and young people with disabilities are already disproportionately suspended, expelled, arrested and funneled into juvenile prisons for alleged behavioral infractions at school.

The FBI’s instructions to surveil and report young people not for wrong they have committed, but for violence they supposedly might enact in the future, is likely to promote an intensification of this draconian practice. Using a program initiated to spy on Muslim-American communities, the government is calling for sanctuaries of learning to be transformed into panopticons, in which students and educators are the informers and all young people are suspect.

[Cheese Sandwich]

6. I really don't like the idea of turning teachers into thought police.

Sometimes people can have "extreme" ideas without having violent ideas about how to achieve it.

Programs like this will have a chilling effect on students who want to learn about anarchism and communism. Which is horrible because we need more education like that, not less. It will deter activism and organizing around environmental causes because people don't want to do anything that might land them on a watch list.

[JoeyT]

2. Once you're on the list, you're going to do something wrong, one way or another.

Even if they have to fabricate it. Then they can hold you up as an example of the program working.

[Cheese Sandwich]

4. This office will need a certain number of investigations and arrests to justify their own jobs.

[TBF]

3. And it's not going to stop with schools -

they will be monitoring everyone and they will use the Patriot Act to do this.

How did Clinton and Sanders vote on the Patriot Act in 2001? Clinton - for and Sanders - against. Starting right there is a good reason not to support Clinton (but I can give you many, many others).

[Cheese Sandwich]

5. Yeah. Completely agree.

Some people think socialists don't care about individual privacy or civil liberties. But they couldn't be more wrong.

[TBF]

7. The term I like is "libertarian communism"

if someone is determined to put a label on me that is what I prefer. Think of the folks that started the Paris Commune or the Kibbutzim in Israel. My answer as to why they didn't work as expected is that we as humans haven't gotten to the point where we accept it (and society is pushing back with their capitalism which makes it doubly hard to go to alternative systems).

Website that kind of describes what I'm talking about: https://libcom.org/

[Cheese Sandwich]

8. That's true.

I like that stuff too but was actually thinking of a different thing, even though there is overlap. Like the US communists who helped found the ACLU about 100 years ago, or people who stood up for political freedom in the 1950s, or for free speech in the 1960s. Straight up through to today. Even though we don't have much power we might be making a comeback.

[TBF]

9. Movements

and that is what is needed to force legislation (along with getting more palatable people into office). Absolutely agree with that.