While Apple and the federal government duke it out over the encrypted
phone of a dead terrorist, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is keeping
things old school by advocating that educators start paying close attention
to any radical leanings among their students.
In January, the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement – a liaison between the
FBI, other feds, and local and school law enforcement – released an unclassified
paper detailing a plan to keep an eye on any latent anti-American activity in
high school youths.
As
Alternet and a few other outlets have noted, the
paper and the matching Countering Violent Extremism website – including a typical
to government clueless one for teens, which involves inane
“learning” games – carefully makes sure not to appear to be targeting merely
Muslim young people, thereby avoiding accusations of racial, religious, or ethnic
profiling. The overall picture then ends up being coy, yet terrifyingly broad
in terms of what might be a sign of dangerous youth activity or thought.
Targeting profiling is bad enough. But the FBI here is also advocating sniffing
even the most delicate stench of radicalism, as the Department of Homeland Security
did in their much-reviled 2009
memo about the supposed Obama presidency-influenced influx of antigovernment
terrorism. Therefore, animal rights activists, anarchists, and others are grouped
together with white supremacists and actual international terrorist groups.
Teen predators all. (Oh, and mental illness is also a danger sign. Because people
dealing with that are not suffering, or disincentivized from getting help enough.)
Violence, in theory, is the dangerous ribbon to tie together these
disparate packages of extremism. However, this is the FBI we’re talking about.
They lately incite more terrorist plots than they
stop. To encourage authority figures to start paying undue attention to teenagers,
and to report anything weird they see to law enforcement is to add more Stasi-style
fearmongering to an already paranoid country, and to even more easily terrified
schools. Schools that have greater and greater tolerance for the presence of
police officers in their halls, and who seem to be arresting more and more students
for even minor infractions.