By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Universities are the hub of innovative research, and the FBI warns, a target for foreign spies.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the FBI has notified universities to be on the look out espionage.

“Some of the greatest threats to academia in the Houston area are the insider threat, theft of trade secrets and economic espionage,” said Maryjo Thomas, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Houston Division

Thomas delivered the warning to more than 100 academic and technology leaders at the FBI’s Houston headquarters.

“It is an initiative whose time has certainly come,” said Mauro Ferrari, president and CEO of the Houston Methodist Research Institute. “Many people in the world would like to have free access to things developed in the United States.”

Donald Trump, via Twitter

By Juan Cole
Truthdig.com

As Donald Trump supporters beat a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protester at his rally in Birmingham, Ala., Trump himself reminded us of the dark days when a paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had the FBI monitor the Rev. Martin Luther King and black Churches of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Trump said in Birmingham, “I want surveillance of certain mosques . . . We’ve had it before, we’ll have it again. … We have a situation where ISIS has raised its ugly head again and we have to chop off that head like they’re chopping off heads.”  He also said he would send Syrian refugees back to Syria if he were elected.  Many Syrian refugees have fled because they would be killed in their homeland.

The African-American protester was beaten, kicked and pulled down, with 8 or 9 people on top of him, as he was called a “monkey” and the N-word.  You wonder if they were wearing brown shirts. The Trump campaign later said it did not condone the behavior, but we haven’t heard Trump himself publicly denounce it. During the altercation, Trump said from the podium, “Yeah, you can get him out. Yeah, get him out. Get him the hell out of here.”

Trump’s desire to spy on American congregations recalls Cointelpro and other domestic surveillance programs of the 1960s that led to massive abuses and in some ways led to Watergate under Nixon.

To read more click here. 

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Oscar Hagelsieb has a unique perspective of life on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.

A child of illegal immigrants, Hagelsieb became a Border Patrol official, a position that seemingly put him at odds with his father, who crossed the border several times.

Before taking the job, he talked to his father.

“My dad’s my biggest hero and I didn’t want to disappoint him or offend him. He had crossed illegally several times and I didn’t know what his opinion was of border control,” Hagelsieb tells Quartz. “My parents didn’t want better lives for themselves—for them it would have been more convenient for them to stay in Mexico with their home and family—but for their children, for us.”

To Hagelsieb’s surprise, his dad encouraged him to pursue his dreams of protecting the border.

“He said that the border patrol and federal law enforcement needed individuals like me to humanize the experience,”  Hagelsieb said of his father.

Hagelsieb’s unlikely story is featured in a recently released documentary, “Kingdom of Shadows.”

Hagelsieb began working as a border patrol agent in Fabens, Texas in 2000, which meant he had to stop people like his parents, who eventually legalized their immigration status.

Hagelsieb shied away from the debate over U.S. immigration laws.

I have no opinion one way or the other,” he says. “As a federal agent, I uphold the laws that lawmakers pass.”

By Editorial Board
Los Angeles Times 

To assure the public of their commitment to transparency and accountability, many law enforcement agencies across the country have embraced body-worn cameras with admirable rapidity. However, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, the U.S. Border Patrol, is moving so slowly to adopt this new technology that it appears not to be moving at all.

In August, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection working group completed a yearlong feasibility study of body cameras at the request of Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske. The group did an adequate job of outlining the pitfalls of having Border Patrol agents wear cameras (resistance by the officers, privacy concerns and cost, among other things) and the benefits (decreased use-of-force incidents, better record-keeping and improved safety of officers).

No surprises there. Police agencies made similar cost-benefit analyses as they prepared to roll out their programs. And while tricky, none of the policy challenges has proved insurmountable. Meanwhile, studies over the past year have found that when police wear body cameras and record video of interactions with suspects, it really does influence the behavior of officers and suspects alike, and dramatically reduces use-of-force incidents.

This made Kerlikowske’s announcement last week that even more review of body cameras was still necessary all the more suspect. Was this just a stalling tactic by a department not committed to transparency?