One Nation Under Surveillance

I know everyone out there already reads The Chronicle of Higher Education, so this is probably old news, but the Chronicle is reporting (sorry, you need a password) that the Pentagon is monitoring student groups, just like it used to do in the bad old days:

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.

Now I would be among the first to point out to anyone that email communications are never private and anything you put on an email can live forever and be subject to endless dissemination, but that's different from having the government actively monitoring student groups communications. It's bad enough they're classifying student protests as "national-security threats" -- how ridiculous is that? -- but they're not content with that level of surveillance; apparently now even the discussion of how to combat a regressive policy like the Clinton administration's "don't ask, don't tell" boondoggle apparently is a grave threat to the nation.

(And don't even get me started on Clinton, who while he looks like George Washington next to Bush's King George III, never took a bold step to push any sort of progressive agenda -- all he did was maintain centrist holding patterns against a right-wing onslaught...don't ask don't tell is just such a halfway policy that did nothing to address the inherent inequality and discrimination in the military)

This administration's distrust of the American people and its obsession with secrecy -- to the point that lying is seen as the way to do business -- rivals the Nixon administration's. It may perhaps be that way because many of the major operators were Nixon acolytes and henchmen, including Karl Rove.