FBI Recruiting Stasi Students, Attempts To Ban Academic Freedom. Sorta.

It sounds like a joke – the FBI wants to stop US students going abroad, ’cause those evil, wily foreigners’ll steal their brains while they’re asleep:

FBI wants students to stop travelling

Fears technology loss

By Nick Farrell: Monday 25 June 2007, 07:50

THE FBI IS visiting the nation’s top technical universities in a bid to stop students taking their holidays outside the country.

MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts, have all had a visit from the spooks to warn them about the dangers of foreign spies and terrorists stealing sensitive academic research. The FBI wants the universities to impose rules that will stop US university students from working late at the campus, travelling abroad, showing an interest in their colleagues’ work, or have friends outside the United States, engaging in independent research, or making extra money without the prior consent of the authorities.

No friends from abroad? Naah, this has to be a windup.

But no, no joke. You can download the guidelines here and they are as draconian as you could imagine. It really is like East Germany all over again:

Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to monitor their colleagues for signs of suspicious behaviour and report any concerns to the FBI or the military.

Read more…

UPDATE: I’m editing this toi give the other side of the coin from a commenter at the link above:

A bit overblown
Submitted by JohnB (not verified) on Sun, 2007-06-24 23:52.

I’m a huge civil libertarian and in fact will be engaging in some ACLU protest activities this week in DC. But this article on Press ESC is really almost to the point of being misleading. Read the original article and guidance document and you’ll see that:

1) The guidance doc specifically says it is applicable to people with access to classified info. Not just students (unless they’re working on classified info).

2) The guidance doc also goes to some length to say that these signs don’t mean someone is a spy, that people should respect each other’s privacy and that good judgment needs to exercised when considering whether to report something.

3) These are not being foisted on universities and there is no apparent attempt to try to get universities to enforce these guidelines. This is essentially a “heads up” list of things that often are associated with people who spy.

And remember: these are guidelines for people working on CLASSIFIED info. I HOPE people who work on (legal) classified projects keep an eye out for these kinds of things.

Now if we could only keep the USDOJ from spying on us without any court oversight, I’d feel MUCH better

Even if that is so, it seems that the FBI is trying to push these guidelines to apply not merely to those working directly on government funded classified projects but also to those attending institutions whose research is largely funded by DOD money. Again with the chipping away at the resistance to spying on each other like good little automatons.