And campus politics at UCSC are preoccupied with domestic spying at the moment…
Last december NBC News reported on a secret 400-page Defense Department document which listed a UCSC protest as one of more than 1,500 activities in the United States tracked over a 10-month period. The protest organized by Students Against War (SAW) sought to disrupt a career fair and ended with Army, Navy and Marine Corps recruiters leaving campus. In the Pentagon document the protest was classified as a “credible threat” to national security, and registered as such in the database known as TALON, or the Threat and Local Observation Notice.
Since this disclosure the academic community has reacted against the surveillance. In different ways. The academic authorities denounced “an environment of surveillance and intimidation threatens the core values of universities and of our nation and sounds chilling echoes of the McCarthy era” and lobbied to get the counter-recruitement action removed from TALON, with success. ACLU filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of UC students whose activities may have been monitored by the Pentagon, and as part of a national effort to reveal the extent and purpose of Pentagon spying. The students have also accused academic authorities of possible involvement in undercover surveillance of student activities.
for more of the story from the perspective of the academic authorities, click here
for more of the story through indymedia, click here