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Post 20

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 7:49amSanction this postReply
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Adam,

Is "Bill" a ROTC cadet (or midshipman if it is NROTC) or one of the instructors?  I am in the military service now and I can concur with Jeremy (who also was in the service) that ROTC cadets are not given the FBI watch list.  I am not 100% sure if instructors are given the watch list, but I doubt it since it is not their responsibility to screen ROTC cadets.  Anyone applying to ROTC is first given a background check by the NSA (National Security Agency) or some other counterintelligence agency before they are accepted into the program (all military officers are required to have at least a security clearance of Secret).  To the best of my knowledge, the only servicemen with regular access to the watch list are those involved in counterintelligence and counterterrorism, or those with a specific need to know.  Given that anyone involved in those fields are given specialized training in that area (Antiterrorism Level III training, or something like that), ROTC cadets and instructors are probably not qualified to perform CI work.

Of course, I could be wrong and the MP's could be knocking on my door anytime soon.


Post 21

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 8:35amSanction this postReply
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Byron,

On my campus - and I am sure that Adam Buker's campus is not different - ROTC facilities and programs are considered THE prime target for potential terrorism. ROTC faculty are sparse - one officer/professor from each service - so students are actively involved in securing ROTC activities from terrorism. I would expect that students assigned to this task DO have access to FBI's list of students who are on the watch list, beacause securing ROTC against potential terrorism would be much more difficult without the list. It is a serious breach of discipline for ROTC cadets to talk about it, but such breaches do happen.

I am also familiar with federal agency need-to-know rules, since I am on the faculty committee planning the NSA certification of the IS security curriculum for our department. The NSA is not involved with the watch list beyond providing intercepts to the FBI and CIA for analysis, and using the watch list to secure their own programs. ROTC faculty and students charged with securing ROTC programs on campus are likely to be getting their list of students on the watch list from the FBI.

I agree with Lindsay that putting Objectivists on the watch list is remarkably stupid. But stupidity is very much the hallmark of government operations here, so the stupidity of this incident is not at all unexpected.

Post 22

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 10:00amSanction this postReply
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Byron was referring to the NSA vetting process for security clearance in the military, not involvement with on-campus counter-terrorism.  When I look at my security clearance of old, it was prepared by the USA Central Personnel Security Clearance Facility, at Fort Meade, Maryland.  Not listed as NSA directly, but an address including "Ft. Meade" is certain enough for me.  You're right, Adam R., the NSA doesn't have anything to do with on-campus security, but they have a lot to do with who gets what information within the military, after each branch's particular intelligence unit has finished with the servicemember.

When all is said and done, the only man who can get to the bottom of this is Pianoman.  If he truly fears for his safety/ privacy--and I wouldn't blame him for being a little paranoid about such things--he needs to head to the ROTC instructors' offices.  Ask them if an FBI watchlist is given to their students, point-blank.  You can assume they would simply lie to him (I wouldn't assume that, but anyone else is free to), but then you'd have to assume that about any government employee you asked, and then you're in "X-Files" territory.  (For anyone not sure about this, see K. Alexander's posts on the Yahoo! forum.)

And if Pianoman's really upset, he can rat on his friend "Bill".  He'll either get fried for breaching a matter of security (which was, for some reason, entrusted to little more than a college kid in a spiffy uniform) or he'll get fried for lying about the whole thing and harassing a member of the general public.  Honor is a big thing in officer candidate training--though it does depend on the particular ROTC program--and hey, he might get booted out of the program.  Unless this mysterious "List" is not classified material, at which point...well, nothing would happen at all. 

The situation isn't hopeless.  Not by a long shot.  It's a minor annoyance that Pianoman can have some fun with if he wants.

(Edited by Jeremy on 10/22, 10:01am)


Post 23

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 12:52pmSanction this postReply
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Of course, if someone were trying to dissuade us from frequenting this site and practicing independent thought, one useful strategy would be to induce paranoia in us, by merely suggesting the possibility that we are now "being watched".

Or maybe playing sadistic mind-games with us, is how such a person grappling with an extreme insignificance and vulnerability complex comes to feel significant and the opposite of vulnerable.  "The best defense is a good offense", as they say.

Whatever the reasons, I'd say it's having an effect.



Post 24

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 6:36amSanction this postReply
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Remember too that if you are on the schools internet that it is simple enough for them to put a sniffer on the router that will monitor all traffic. Can even email someone if key terms are found. Most schools too have students that assist with all of the network setup and the information can get into the wrong hands of some "dude" that has lost touch with reality, vicariously lives through others, and then is threatened by intelligence so takes it out in the form of an undercover FBI informant."

So again anyone sniffing the router, needs to step away from the computer and go out and meet a girl or guy.

sincerely,
JML

Post 25

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 11:20amSanction this postReply
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As I said and reiterate, it is uncertain whether Mr. Buker is actually under any FBI surveyance.  I could believe this is just a prank and a mistake; I can also believe such surveyance exists and that campus ROTC is one of the venues of this surveyance.

But Linz wrote:

All I can say is - if the FBI regard SOLO as subversive and radical and worth worrying about (which I doubt), I'm reassured and gratified! In the unlikely event that they're reading this, I say to them: gentlemen, I hope you're also sufficiently astute to realise that SOLO is, in a very profound sense, on your side, dedicated as it is to the uniquely American values of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." For that very reason, no SOLOist poses a threat to anyone's life, liberty or property. In that sense, we are *not* worth worrying about, and you can safely focus your attention elsewhere.
With all due respect, and rather charmed by your reassurance and gratification above, with regards to the alignment of the FBI...

Linz, what planet are you on?

'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' may or may not be American values, but they are only applied to 'good citizens', and real or alleged subversives certainly fall outside of such organizations.  In the recent past, the state has infiltrated the anti-war left (during the Vietnam war era), the hard patriot right (during the 1990s), and the anti-Globalist left (during the late 1990s and early 2000s).  We (Americans) are at war now, in a fiercely culturally divided climate, under an administration  that has shown no respect for the civil liberties- as witnessed by the PATRIOT act, Guantanamo Bay, and its policies in occupied Iraq, not to mention uttering public statements such as 'be careful what you say.'  In our current environment, (most) libertarians and (most) progressives constitute those opposed to the state's agenda, and that includes at least some libertarians on this site.  It is true that the state is probably fuzzy on the difference between Objectivists and non-Objectivist libertarians, but that's not the point.  These times are precisely the kind of times in which the state, to give a charitable assessment of its intentions, believe it has to burn the 'American way' to save it.  We are at war.  Study history and beware what states will do in wartime.

I was on the progressive protest circuit for a year or two during the time of the worldwide antiglobalist protests (though I did not participate in those particular protests as I am a free-trader, though not in love with global corporate mercantilism either).  Anyway, the state on all levels had no hesitation whatsoever of harassing completely peaceful protesters.  I knew people who were arrested in cordoned off blocks for walking down the street peacefully, people who were sprayed with tear gas for opening car windows to police officers, and one friend- a very intelligent English/history/polisci triple major -and a libertarian- who was jailed and taunted in jail with being 'offered' to the hard core prisoners in the adjoining cell block (I expect this was just to scare him, but it shows the authorities' mentality).  The police also regularly abused fire codes and zoning provisions to try to lock out or temporarily arrest protesters to disrupt their gatherings prior to protests.

I also read articles, which fit perfectly with my experience, where the state infiltrated progressive organizations for the purposes of recoding the names of all involved.  In the particular case I read in most detail, I will allow myself to be amused.  The people who turned out to be police agents sounded kind of fake to the progressive organizers, so the agents got volunteered to build the protest puppets.  Well, the main thing the leftists commented on afterwords was how impressed they were at the hard work at carpentry the infiltrating agents were doing.  The attitude was something like "wow, man, we've never seen such hard work...  maybe we should try it!"  (no, not all progressives are like this... but it is amusing).

Quite seriously, my point is that state infiltration does happen.  And let us remember that leftists and lazybutts dsereve the same protections of individual rights and any others.

Furthermore, are libertarians here truly, fully conscious of the scope of the drug war?  America now imprisons more persons proportionally than any other country on the planet, and the majority of the these people are nonviolent drug offenders.  Objectivists should take this seriously.  Yes, I know Objectivists believe in the right to use drugs, but most of them have an irrational moral hesitation if not outright condemnation for illegal drug use they do not employ towards the consumers of, say, alcohol.  There have been articles on this site recently extolling the value of wine, yet many on the social left treat marijuana and ecstasy precisely the same way, and I personally have known at least one person who used crystal meth is a rational, purposeful, and civilized manner... specifically, the person was a professor of business ethics enjoying a private celebration; he had been invited to give a month of lectures in Ireland.

I say this because many Objectivist easily denounce drug users as 'those people' and do not seriously stop to think of the millions of people being persecuted in their midst.  But millions are in people are in jail and have hurt no one.  In this country, and with the support of the majority of the American populace who views drug users as 'those people' and believes that their subversion of the values they wish to instill in their children justifies the suspension of individual rights.

This is also America.  This is real.  I could site other examples, including some jaw-dropping cases of hypocrisy.  But the point is the America Objectivists believe in is not applied to social dissidents.  Anyone here who has been GLBT in the wrong era or in the wrong part of the country knows what I am talking about... in the neighboring city to which I lived for most of the last six years, the favorite sport of the local police department was cruising certain areas of town, picking of men and entrapping them into public statements of intent to commit acts of sodomy... this stopped and stopped only because of liberal "judicial imperialism" from the bench of the Supreme Court.

The same double standard of treatment applies to anyone outside of mainstream America.  At various times, this means drug users, progressives, homosexuals, youth culture, sexual radicals, and the ethnic group of suspicion of the moment.  I am amazed to the degree that 'good citizens' go through every day, not realizing that if they were dressed a bit differently, they might suddenly find themselves scared to stop on the street because they had lost the directions to a party to which they were going and were trying to remember the address.  Yet I know some wild friends who have been harassed by police officers for this very crime.

The American Way is not simply life, liberty, and property.  That is one American way, I grant, but it is not the American way believed in by our dominant political or cultural institutions.  The essence of that America is a Calvinist 'American Dream' whereby respectable, middle class people busily engaged in suburbanity-chasing are a social core of good citizenship which mist be protected from cultural erosion, both by protection of their rights and the denial of the rights of others who, if able to safely get a public forum, would disrupt these prized cultural institutions.  Once the line is drawn that one is socially 'other', American society can be very intolerant.  Now that the country is on a war footing, in a war explicitly in defense of an 'American Civilization', those who doubt a war fought largely on cultural grounds might well have the same standards applied to them.  It has happened before.  I find it completely plausable- though hardly certain- that this time libertarians could fall until the rubric of suspicion.

Frankly, if libertarians, whose ranks include many classes of people the government- and most of America- considers social cockroaches, find it difficult to believe that the state would harrass and intimidate cultural dissidents, then I fear libertarians share too much with Republicans who also partially derive their good attitude towards America from its peculiar treatment of 'respectable' citizens and think nothing of the fact that large groups of peaceful Americans are treated in the same mental category as predatory criminals.  In Republicans case, they smugly support it. 

And honestly, I find it kind of silly to be a radical who would never think of getting into trouble with the law.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, to my knowledge, infringed no statutes, and lived in a very free country for his times, yet he had no trouble thinking of the powers that be as essentially enemies.  Where is that spirit of rebellion among today's Objectivists?  Do you truly think the lust for control among the social, political, and moral establishment truly ended circa 1789?  Do you truly believe that the gendarmes and police-spies act very differently now than the police who harassed labor unionists, anarchists, or Vietnam War protesters in the past?

Howard Roark, Francisco d'Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjold would all fall under the anti-terrorist provisions of our current laws.

When will Objectivism stop trusting Monseuir Inspector Javert?

Bob Dylan:
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
And the country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.
....
In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ w
as
Betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

 
This too is 'America'.

Dominique Venice


Post 26

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 12:32pmSanction this postReply
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Jennifer-

And Dominique, I would normally oblige your request, but I've just edited a 150+ page book in the last 24 hours, and I wish to have nothing to do with books for the next 24.  :)
 
Shame on you for not having a copy of Atlas with you at all times.  :P
Certainly OK... no altruistic duties implied.  :)
 
As for a copy of Atlas... I own a library, I think.  But due to controls on the free market and the fact that landlording tends to attract power-lusters (exceptions are logically possible, no offense to any landlords here), I have been unable to find settled housing where I can take the time to set up my 6,000 volume library assembled at 12.5c per book by used book dealing.
 
Otherwise... Anvil Fall (you have pet names for books, right?) would have an honored place on a shelf above my sewing table.


Post 27

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 2:16pmSanction this postReply
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Geez...the paranoia here can't go any higher and still let the clouds go by.

Post 28

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 2:50pmSanction this postReply
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Jeffrey,

Damn good point.  A lot of these pathetically conceited, "little tin gods" of the computer age who fancy themselves as "amused little puppet masters" really should attempt some backbone and stop living off of the lives of others, in order to maintain their unwarranted and laughable delusions of untouchable, "puppet master" supremacy.  

They refuse to live honestly and actually deal with the real world, so they create all these artificial circumstances whereby they can reign as subjectivist lords (I'm talking about computers here).  It wouldn't hurt them to get outside in the fresh air, embark on adventures that are fat-burning and muscle-building, and god forbid, mix and mingle with non-inflatable people.   

Oh, and putting down the shovel-ful of Moon Pies wouldn't hurt, either... You fat bastard!

(Edited by Orion Reasoner on 10/22, 3:01pm)


Post 29

Friday, October 22, 2004 - 4:15pmSanction this postReply
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Yeah!  Damn fatties!!

*privately consoles his developing Buddha-belly.*

(It's so sensitive to criticism, you know.)


Post 30

Sunday, October 24, 2004 - 2:16pmSanction this postReply
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If this is indeed a prank( I hope it is) I will eat crow and remove the article and put in its place a hilarious account of how and why I bloodied a ROTC cadet named "Bill". I still think that it was important to put the article up because if this is the case, I still stand by what I say. Regardless of what happens, I'm not going to let this stop me from living my own life. If we are being watched, lets make this interesting. Lets give them a demonstration of what we are for.

Orion said:
Of course, if someone were trying to dissuade us from frequenting this site and practicing independent thought, one useful strategy would be to induce paranoia in us, by merely suggesting the possibility that we are now "being watched".

Or maybe playing sadistic mind-games with us, is how such a person grappling with an extreme insignificance and vulnerability complex comes to feel significant and the opposite of vulnerable.  "The best defense is a good offense", as they say.

Whatever the reasons, I'd say it's having an effect.

I say:
This is all the more reason to continue business as usual. Nothing and no one should get in the way of free men and women who wish to mutually and (most of the time :) peacefully discuss philosophy, the arts, politics, and other subjects.

Jeremy said:
And if Pianoman's really upset, he can rat on his friend "Bill".  He'll either get fried for breaching a matter of security (which was, for some reason, entrusted to little more than a college kid in a spiffy uniform) or he'll get fried for lying about the whole thing and harassing a member of the general public.  Honor is a big thing in officer candidate training--though it does depend on the particular ROTC program--and hey, he might get booted out of the program.  Unless this mysterious "List" is not classified material, at which point...well, nothing would happen at all.

I say:
So if I find out he's lied to me, I've got him by the balls? Awesome! I already feel better.

Adam

Post 31

Sunday, October 24, 2004 - 9:43pmSanction this postReply
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That's if his instructors/ ROTC administration take you seriously, Adam.  They could just blow you off.  It's not like he shot your dog and burned your house down.

Post 32

Monday, October 25, 2004 - 7:50amSanction this postReply
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Unless the FBI watch list is unclassified (which it is not), I doubt ROTC cadets, and even ROTC instructors, are given access to the list.  Counterintelligence is a very specialized field even in the military intelligence community.  Not everyone in the military is qualified to do it, much less some "college kid in a spiffy uniform", as Jeremy puts it.  Every serviceman is given an Antiterrorism and Force Protection briefing, but I have sat through enough of those (Level I and II) to know that they are part fluff and part common sense.  Unless they were specifically accepted for the 4-year scholarship program, or an enlisted commissioning program, ROTC cadets have no military obligation until their junior year of college.  Giving them access to classified material would be a suspect practice, especially since the NSA takes at least a year to approve a Top Secret security clearance (I'm assuming the FBI watch list is at least Top Secret).

Jeremy is right.  Pianoman's best course of action is bringing this to the attention of the ROTC instructors.  Either this ROTC cadet lied to a civilian (dishonorable) or he discussed classified material with someone without a security clearance (dishonorable).  Either way, he committed an honor violation and he should be reprimanded, if not disqualified from the officer corps.


Post 33

Friday, August 28, 2009 - 5:01pmSanction this postReply
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Please note that every single person above has disappeared from this forum. Scary.

Sanction: 11, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 11, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 11, No Sanction: 0
Post 34

Friday, August 28, 2009 - 5:19pmSanction this postReply
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Thank God I never posted in this thread!

... Oh ... crap.


Post 35

Friday, August 28, 2009 - 5:46pmSanction this postReply
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[snort]




.........................................[and here a fjord....] ;-)

Post 36

Friday, August 28, 2009 - 6:46pmSanction this postReply
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You guys are blowing this FBI thing way out of proportion. The FBI wouldn't do anything like that to anyone.........and their agents are as intelligent as they are handsome.......especially the ones that work in cyber ops.

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