Daily Archives: August 9, 2017

Surveillance technologies have historically restricted the freedoms of communities of color and immigrants in this country. This history continues today through a resurgent national security apparatus with emboldened nationalist tendencies. Members of Congress have the power to rein these surveillance mechanisms. At this moment, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is pending reauthorization from Congress. This piece of legislation must be reformed in order to prevent dragnet surveillance, backdoor searches of phone and email records, and unlawful targeting of communities of color and immigrant communities. Unless these revisions are made, Congress should let the provision expire.

Ken Montenegro ( @kmontenegro ) is national vice president of the National Lawyers Guild in New York. Steven Renderos ( @stevenrenderos ) is organizing director at the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, California.

Section 702 allows for warrantless surveillance of conversations between people in the US and in foreign countries. The law passed in 2008 during the George W. Bush's presidency, was extended by the Obama administration, and is now set to expire at the end of 2017, unless Congress reauthorizes the provisiona move the Trump administration supports.

Rebuttals to questions of surveillance often go something like this: 'If youve got nothing to hide, then you shouldnt be worried.' But a review of American history points to the same groups being routinely spied on by the government: black and native bodies, immigrants, poor communities, and anybody deemed as an other or a threat to national security. High-profile cases of surveilled prominent figures include civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez , who were both monitored by the FBI.

More recently, cities like Baltimore experienced dragnet surveillance after protesting against the police murder of Freddie Gray. Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson, Missouri became targets of surveillance . Muslim communities have long withstood surveillance of their neighborhoods, mosques, and community leaders . If history is any indicator, the net cast on those suspected of being threats to our nations safety is vastand in a time where much of the nation is intent on resisting and dissenting, this puts much of the country at risk of being surveilled. Furthermore, surveillance, particularly enabled under 702, is nefariously opaque .

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Don't Buy the Latest Trump Surveillance Hype

Proponents of Section 702, such as the Heritage Foundation , and Trumps homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Thomas Bossert, argue that oversight protocols and existing language in the provision will prevent significant overreach. In an op-ed in the New York Times published earlier this year, Bossert claimed that Section 702 doesnt allow for targeting of US citizens, emphasizing that the provision expressly forbids intentional targeting and that an individual court order supported by probable cause is needed to surveil citizens and foreigners inside the US.

But newly declassified memos reviewed by The Hill revealed a slew of violations by the NSA and FBI during the Obama administration, proving that although intentional targeting of US citizens may not be allowed, citizens' data is nonetheless being interceptedand searched. Among the various violations cited in the memo are numerous overcollection incidents, and the misuse of overly broad queries or specific US person terms to search through NSA data.

Immigrants are also largely at risk of being surveilled through Section 702s so-called upstream monitoring , which allows communication to a friend or family member outside of the country (or browser history, chat logs), to be searched for potential selectors or keywords of interest. This means that more than a quarter of the US populationmore than 84 million peopleare at risk of having their data intercepted.

We recently visited our nations capitol with a delegation of community leaders and policy advocates from across the country to meet with Senators Al Franken (D-MN), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR), along with Representatives Justin Amash (R-MI) and Keith Ellison (D-MN), to discuss the impacts of new surveillance technologies on immigrant communities and religious minorities. Among the solutions proposed was to reform Section 702 to close the backdoor search loophole, and prevent overly broad law enforcement from being used to target immigrants and citizens of color, religious minorities, and activists.

Last month, the Center for Media Justice joined over two dozen civil rights and civil liberties groups including the ACLU and Color of Change to send a letter to the House Judiciary Committee recommending reforms to the provision. History shows that intelligence programs without adequate oversight, demonstrated by COINTELPRO and the contents of the Edward Snowden revelations, inevitably overstep their mandates.

Congress should recall the origins of the fourth amendment in this moment: Lets stop putting mass surveillance technologies in the hands of intelligence agencies, especially with nothing but the misplaced hope they will do the right thing.

Ken Montenegro ( @kmontenegro ) is national vice president of the National Lawyers Guild in New York. Steven Renderos ( @stevenrenderos ) is organizing director at the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, California. WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here .

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Warrantless US Spying Is Set to Expire Soon. Let It Die - WIRED

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It looks like the Trump administration is getting ready to attack race-based affirmative action in higher education.

Last week, media outlets reported that a memo had been circulated to the Justice Departments civil rights division soliciting people interested in investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions. It takes no great effort to deduce that the colleges and universities that may be the targets of investigations and possible litigation are the ones that alter their admissions criteria so as to admit a meaningful number of black, Latinx, and indigenous studentsstudents from historically disadvantaged racial groups.

Race-based affirmative action has always been controversial in light of the fact that in order to distribute some seats in an incoming class to black, Latinx, and indigenous students, some seats have to be distributed away from students who would otherwise be admitted: white and Asian students. It is for this reason that opponents of such efforts sometimes deride them by calling them instances of reverse racism. Supporters of affirmative action deny this description, defending the programs on the basis of diversity. They say that affirmative action facilitates racial diversity in colleges and universities. And diversity, they say, is good for everyone.

Diversity is a dreadfully weak defense of affirmative action. This is true although the Supreme Courts 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action programs that use race in admissions in order to pursue the educational benefits that flow from a racially diverse student body, makes it necessary for affirmative actions defenders to speak in terms of diversity. Nevertheless, diversity makes it easy to forget why the nation first thought to experiment with race-conscious policies in college admissions and hiring. Thus, it may be helpful to recount the history of affirmative action: it may be helpful to remember and remind ourselves that affirmative action was, and still is, a mechanism that is designed to remedy the historical wrongs that have been inflicted upon black, Latinx, and indigenous people.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is rightfully understood as the birthplace of affirmative action. While those who participated in this social movement conceptualized intentional racial discrimination as a key mechanism that worked to exclude black people from the life of the nation and to relegate them to the bottom of social, cultural, political, and economic hierarchies, they appreciated that other processes functioned to produce the same results. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS55, Hon.59) argued that even if intentional racial discrimination was never again practiced in the country, black poverty, the historic and institutionalized consequences of color, would persist. Hence, thinkers of the day understood that formal legal equality for black people would not result in substantive equality for this historically disadvantaged group.

Accordingly, activists certainly celebrated the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race-based discrimination (as well as discrimination on the basis of color, religion, sex, and national origin) in significant areas of American life. However, they conceptualized this piece of legislation as a necessary, but not sufficient, step in the fight for racial justice. Also required were efforts to dismantle the race-neutral processes that destroyed black peoples ability to participate themselves as equals into the body politic. They understood that exclusion from job opportunities and educational institutions was as much a function of intentional discrimination as it was of the way that merit and qualifications had been defined.

The Equal Opportunity Act, which was the legislative piece of President Lyndon B. Johnsons War on Poverty, complemented the Civil Rights Act inasmuch as it implemented job training and social welfare programs that were designed to help the poor acquire skills that could help them participate in the labor market, and ideally, emerge from poverty. But still, many felt that the programs that the Equal Opportunity Act implemented were insufficient to realize what the civil rights activists demanded: full-throated racial justice. They offered race-based affirmative action programs as the vehicle for making tangible that demand. It was these programs to which President Johnson referred in a speech on Howard Universitys campus in June 1965, noting that the country must enter the next and the more profound stage in the battle for civil rights.

Thus, affirmative action is not about diversity. It is about remedy. It is about addressing this nations sad, sorry, and sustained history of racism against historically disadvantaged racial groups. As prominent legal scholar Charles Lawrence has written: The original vision of affirmative action proceeded from the perspective of the subordinated. [When the] students and community activists who fought for affirmative action in the 1960s and 70s demanded affirmative actionwhen they sat-in and sued and took over buildings and went on hunger strikes and closed down universitiesthey sought redress for their communities.

Suffice it to say that we have not redressed the racial wounds that have been inflicted on black, Latinx, and indigenous people (as well as on many Asian communities). The quality of the lives of many people of color is too poorand their lives too shortto suggest otherwise.

This is not to argue that affirmative action is adequateis the only thing that we need to do to right our racial wrongs. It is not. We need to make many other interventions to remove the race-based burdens that devastatingly high numbers of black, Latinx, and indigenous people bear. However, the Trump administration is not interested in intervening so as to improve the lives of this countrys truly disadvantaged groups. Instead, it is gearing up to attack one powerful, if ultimately insufficient, effort to produce a nation that reflects the commitments to equality and justice contained in its founding documents.

Khiara M. Bridges, a School of Law professor of law and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of anthropology, can be reached atkmb73@bu.edu. The author ofReproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (University of California Press, 2011), she has written widely on the issues of race, class, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. Her latest book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights (Stanford University Press, 2017), explores the moral construction of poverty and its effects on poor mothers privacy rights.

POV is anopinion pagethat provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact Rich Barlow atbarlowr@bu.edu.BU Todayreserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.

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POV: Defending Affirmative Action - BU Today

Enhancing economic growth, strengthening secondary education and making health care more accessible are top priorities in the state, and the University of Missouri Extension wants to help reach these goals by focusing more on the mission of the University of Missouri.

Enhancing economic growth, strengthening secondary education and making health care more accessible are top priorities in the state, and the University of Missouri Extension wants to help reach these goals by focusing more on the mission of the University of Missouri. Dr. Marshall Stewart, vice chancellor for extension and engagement for the University of Missouri Extension was in Chillicothe Saturday, concluding a string of visits through western Missouri. He toured Chillicothe and met with several community members and University of Missouri Extension supporters. We have to return to our mission, which is to take the core of the university the research and innovation of the university and drive it out to our network, Stewart said. We need to identify the needs and figure out how to align our resources better and make an impact. In his position, Stewart oversees extension outreach programs and travels throughout the state looking for ways to better engage with Missourians through extension, whether it be in its work in k-12 education, the school of medicine, its work in agriculture, 4-H or any other area of interest. He stated that the University of Missouri was established in 1839 to serve the people as a public land grant university bringing into play research and extension as well as teaching aspects and emphasizing that universities are not just for the elite but for the common man and woman. In todays world, how do we take all the disciplines and ensure that the institution is accessible to all?, he questioned. What are the needs economically in the state, for education, health, and the environment? Missourians want to see more economic growth. We are looking at all the assets of the institution, Stewart said. How can we bring more support to the communities with the research and innovation that we have? Enhancing secondary education is another focus for improvement. People see a need in Missouri for better workforce preparation, Stewart said. Programs such as the Litton Agri-Science Learning Center and Grand River Technical Schools Building Trades program which involves students building homes are significant in helping prepare students for the workforce. The Litton ag center... its phenomenal, Stewart said. Just imagine if we could replicate that maybe not always with an ag theme, but something else in other parts of the state. These are examples we can share with other communities. Stewart also noted that improvements should be made for health care accessibility. There are health deserts, he said. We need to learn how to work better with tele-medicine, how to graduate more doctors who want to go to rural, under-served areas, and learn how to create better opportunities for nurses. We have a chance here to set a new standard of what it means to be a publicly-engaged university and do it in a way that is very intentional and meaningful in the lives of Missourians, Stewart stated. Another significant challenge in Missouri is to make broadband internet available throughout the state. There are broadband deserts not only in rural Missouri, but even in St. Louis County, he said. He likened the campaign for bringing broadband internet to Missouri to the drive many years ago to bring electricity to rural communities. This is like our modern day rural electrification, he said. Missouri Extension, he noted, was integral in helping that movement get started through education. We helped communities get engaged in that, he said. We worked with other agencies. Stewart stated that the Extension is working with other agencies, entities to implement broadband. If we can figure out how to do that in rural Missouri, we can bring great economic development, improved education and improved health care, Stewart said. This is a longterm project and it will take a longterm strategy to work it out.

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Vice chancellor seeks stronger ties between University Extension, public - Chillicothe Constitution Tribune