Workplace Blog

Inside Higher Ed: Crossing A Line

“I enjoy writing things that inflame, mock and infuriate the right,” Deborah Frisch said in an e-mail interview Sunday in response to a question about her online activities. By any measure, she’s achieving her goals — and she’s also out of a job.

Frisch posted a comment last week on Protein Wisdom, a Web site known for its no holding back conservative commentary, frequently with considerable mocking of liberal academics and ideas. Frisch, an adjunct lecturer at the University of Arizona until this weekend, said in the posting that she would not be sad if the 2-year old child of the site’s founder, Jeff Goldstein, was “Jon Benet Ramseyed,” and she reportedly posted other questions of the sort a Ramsey-inspired attacker might ask. (Goldstein lives in Colorado, where Ramsey was killed.)

Although Frisch apologized for the remark, which she called “nasty,” numerous conservative Web sites over the weekend traded stories about Frisch, saying that she had physically threatened Goldstein and his child (she denies this and says that however inappropriate her comments were, they weren’t threatening); that Frisch is Churchillian, as in Ward, not Winston (she agrees on some counts and has defended the notorious “little Eichmanns” remark); and that Frisch organized an online attack on Protein Wisdom (she denies this). They called on Arizona administrators to fire her (e-mail addresses were provided).

The Chronicle: Pentagon Surveillance of Student Groups as Security Threats Extended to Monitoring E-Mail, Reports Show

The Department of Defense monitored e-mail messages from college students who were planning protests against the war in Iraq and against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against gay and lesbian members of the armed forces, according to surveillance reports released last month. While the department had previously acknowledged monitoring protests on campuses as national-security threats, it was not until recently that evidence surfaced showing that the department was also monitoring e-mail communications.

The surveillance reports — which were released to lawyers for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network on June 15 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the organization last December — concern government surveillance at the State University of New York at Albany, Southern Connecticut State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and William Paterson University of New Jersey. The documents contain copies of e-mail messages sent in the spring semester of 2005 detailing students’ plans to protest on-campus military recruitment.The reports are part of a government database known as Talon that the Department of Defense established in 2003 to keep track of potential terrorist threats. Civilians and military personnel can report suspicious activities through the Talon system using a Web-based entry form. A Pentagon spokesman, Greg Hicks, would not verify whether the reports released last month were follow-ups to tips from military or government personnel, or from civilians at the universities.

The government had already turned over one batch of surveillance reports to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network in April, which is when the group first became aware that the Pentagon’s surveillance program extended to monitoring e-mail communications. After lawyers from both sides settled a dispute over the definition of “surveillance,” the Pentagon turned over the latest group of reports.

One e-mail message from the reports, which appears to be from an organizer, describes a protest planned for April 21, 2005, at SUNY-Albany. The message details students’ intentions to deliver a petition to the university’s president and to hold a rally at which protesters would be “playing anarchist soccer and taking part in a drum circle.” The e-mail also includes information about a “Critical Mass bike ride” for later that day in which students could ride their bicycles to express “solidarity with Earth Day.”

That the government would monitor such seemingly innocuous e-mail messages raises concerns about First Amendment and privacy rights, according to Steve R. Ralls, director of communications for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

“It’s always both surprising and disturbing to learn that our federal government believes the exercise of constitutional liberties should be a threat to our national security,” he said. “The student groups who were the subject of the Pentagon surveillance campaign were simply exercising their freedom of speech, and that is what makes our nation stronger, not more vulnerable.”

Kermit L. Hall, president of SUNY-Albany, said on Wednesday that he had not yet seen the documents, but that “when it comes to any kind of surveillance, especially on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ issue, I am very unsympathetic to the intrusion of the government into an area where I believe it is simply inappropriate.”

He said that the university’s lawyer was looking into the details of the surveillance, and would try to determine whether the e-mail messages were actively intercepted or obtained in some other way — a distinction that would affect how the university proceeds.

The reports in question were removed from the Pentagon database following an in-house review of the Talon reporting system earlier this year, which concluded that all Talon reports must relate to international terrorist activity. As such, reports that “did not contain a foreign-terrorist-threat nexus” were removed, Mr. Hicks, the Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail message on Wednesday.

The Talon reporting system gained national attention in December 2005 when NBC News obtained a copy of a 400-page Department of Defense document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” that had taken place across the country. Only 21 pages were released to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, since the group requested only documents related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and student groups. Mr. Hicks would not disclose the total number of reports that have been filed under the Talon program.

San Antonio Express-News: N.Y. Times is back at college — for now

The University of the Incarnate Word announced Friday that it will reinstate the library’s print subscription to the New York Times after canceling it earlier this week to protest the publication of articles exposing the government’s secret anti-terror program to monitor international banking transactions.

The Chronicle News Blog

The chief librarian at the University of the Incarnate Word, a Roman Catholic institution in San Antonio, has canceled the library’s subscription to The New York Times to protest its decision to publish an article last week on the Bush administration’s use of an international banking database to track terrorists, a practice that also exposed the financial transactions of thousands of Americans unconnected to terrorist groups.

In an e-mail message to his staff on Wednesday, the university’s dean of library services, Mendell D. Morgan Jr., wrote that the Times article bordered on “treason” because the article disclosed information that would help terrorists and other enemies of the United States, according to today’s Express-News, a newspaper in San Antonio. He said canceling the subscription was a concrete way to protest the decision to publish the article, although he did not say if he would take similar action against the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, which printed similar articles.

The Albuquerque Tribue: Suspension was shock at NMHU

Mexico Highlands Board of Regents met last Friday, but something was amiss, student body president Jesse Lopez says.

Manny Aragon, president of the Las Vegas, N.M. university since 2004, wasn’t sitting next to board Chairman Javier Gonzales, but off to the left, near faculty and student senate members, Lopez said.

“What kind of statement were they trying to make?” Lopez wondered at the time.

The statement seemed to manifest itself Wednesday when Gonzales announced Aragon had been placed on administrative leave.