"Alert" of the Week
How can you tell when your federal government is run by knaves? One way is to be on the lookout for alerts like this one.
Federal agents are warning leaders at some of the [Boston] region's top universities—including MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts—to be on the lookout for foreign spies or potential terrorists trying to steal their research, the head of the FBI's Boston office said yesterday....
"What we're most concerned about are those things that are not classified being developed by MIT, Worcester Polytech, and other universities," said Warren T. Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office. He said colleges are vulnerable to those looking to exploit that information and use it against the United States.
The FBI's website says universities should consider the possibility of foreign spies posing as international students or visitors and terrorists studying advanced technologies and scientific breakthroughs on campus, as well as violent extremists and computer hackers.
Now, get this straight: the FBI is discussing unclassified research—topics that are not considered vital to national security, and the sorts of things that academics discuss at conferences and publish in research journals all the time.
How is it possible that things that researchers are trying to get published in open forums are somehow targets of espionage? Somehow it does not seem all that plausible that al-Qaeda is looking for a few months' advance notice of the latest in distributed computing, literary criticism, or materials science. But it does seem plausible that the Bush administration will do almost anything to foment fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Labels: putported espionage, Stupid Republican tricks, universities
