T-Mobile Gives In

T-Mobile USA, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, was the last of the four major cellphone carriers to preserve a semblance of its customers' civil liberties. When they acquired VoiceStream in 2001, they capitulated to the demands of the Department of Justice and the FBI for lawful intercept points in their equipment. While this wasn't ideal, it was a compromise given the circumstances and the important thing was that it extended to LAWFUL intercept only. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security never received the kind of access they desired to T-Mobile's network...but since what they were seeking was illegal anyway, there wasn't much they could do about it. In 2007, T-Mobile purchased the rights to airwaves from the FCC to deliver new, broadband wireless services to its customers. They spent about 3 BILLION dollars on these airwaves. However, the government decided to withhold those airwaves from T-Mobile because it would not grant carte blanche access to its customers' private data. This set T-Mobile back an entire year as they tried everything to get the government to let go of the spectrum, even offering $50 million in bribe money at one point. The government wouldn't budge. T-Mobile decided to acquire a small carrier in the southeast US, SunCom Wireless, earlier in 2007. The government withheld final approval, again because T-Mobile would not let the privacy of its customers go. This is a rare example of a corporation making visible sacrifice on behalf of the people it serves, protecting them from a government flush with illegally gained power.

That is, until today. Finally, given great financial pressure from shareholders in Deutsche Telekom as well as the lagging status of its cellular network in the US, the company gave the Department of Homeland Security the blanket access it had so long desired. Watch what you say.

Sources:
BetaNews article
CNet article

WikiLeaks.org Getting the Shaft

Wikileaks.org is a system for totally anonymous, liability-free leaking of documents to the general public...an essential tool in the times of increased opacity at all levels of government and business. It is a site that I would link you to right away, if I could. Unfortunately, I can't. A California court has ordered a Domain Name Registrar (the entity that keeps the addresses to websites) to stop allowing access to wikileaks.org because it leaked information about the banking practices of entities within the Cayman Islands. So, basically, the US government is restricting press freedoms on a worldwide scale on behalf of private interests doing business in another country. Wikileaks has been instrumental in the political process through its leaking of Guantanamo Bay detainee treatment manuals, national ID card procedures in Britain, etc. They have managed to keep their site running using different domain names, and you can access information about the current issues here. The text of the court's injunction can be found here.

Sad.

A Matter of Local Concern

Hold your head up high,
Cuz tomorrow you may die,
Cuz no one's safe around here,
No one's safe around here.
Stand your ground,
Til you're the last one in town.

Someone that you trust turned out to be a tricker,
Smoking cigarettes, getting stoned on liquor,
Getting really dizzy, only getting sicker,
Small problems now only seem bigger.
America's a safe place,
If you're gonna leave it,
And the rhetoric is there,
If you're gonna read it,
And the hollow masses,
The machines defeated,
And the rich look down to arrive on the bleeding.

Hold your head up high,
Cuz tomorrow you may die,
Cuz no one's safe around here,
No one's safe around here.
Stand your ground,
Til you're the last one in town.

Hardly enough,
It gets tough when you're running,
So you bust out the homeless,
When they start coming,
In LA, Broadway, it's wicked when they're watching,
And your backup and your backup and your backup ain't working.
There's no food, so you're spurred into action,
Set up and go to no satisfaction,
Ice and snow is the city passion,
When you walk in the shadows, girl, there's no protection.

Hold your head up high,
Cuz tomorrow you may die,
Cuz there's no one safe around here,
No one's safe around here.
Stand your ground,
Til you're the last one in town.

OK, well,
This is the city of Los Angeles,
And it never sleeps,
It may look like it,
But it doesn't.
It lives and breathes nocturnally,
So when you've got no place to sleep at night,
And you're all huddled up,
And you're cold,
Well, this song goes out to the city's forgotten.
Hey, Tim, take us on home....

Underlying reason, well she can't keep it going,
In the middle of the night,
they found her frozen,
And the Wal-Mart sign,
Keeps on glowing,
And the winds of change keep on blowing.

Hold your head up high,
Cuz tomorrow you may die,
Cuz no one's safe around here,
No one's safe around here.
Stand your ground,
Til you're the last one in town.

-Rancid, "Stand Your Ground"

A guy called in to my radio show at the Impact, audibly distressed, asking about this song. He said I wouldn't believe him if he told me what he was seeing in Lansing when he heard me play it earlier this morning. "This was some fucked up shit...something's really fucked up around here..." That's all I can find it in me to write here.

Letter to the Lansing Area Peace Community

To the greater Lansing and MSU peace community:

As you may be aware March 20th will be the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. This is a call for all concerned citizens, students, and community members to foster a coalition for peace and an end to the war in Iraq.

There will be a forum to discuss possible action on March 20th. We would like as many groups as possible to participate so that a united decision can be made by all voices present.

Please join us on February 15 @ 3:30 in the lobby of the Union.

In Solidarity,
Ignite & S.E.J.

Also check out the event on the calendar above.

An Open Letter to the MSU Administration

February 1, 2008

To Whom It May Concern:

As a student activist at Michigan State University who is dedicated to maintaining the diversity upon this campus, I feel it is my duty to express to you my opinions about the student space available to student organizations and the abilities for likeminded groups to network with one another.

It is my belief, and the belief of many of my colleagues that MSU should have a central location for the Council of Racial and Ethnic Students and the Council of Progressive Students (CORES/COPS) groups, along with a number of other racial, ethnic and progressive groups that are not affiliated with ASMSU, to host meetings, programs, and educational conferences. This idea has been brought before Provost Kim Wilcox and Dr. Lee June in past years under the opinion that there should be a free-standing Multicultural Center (MCC), and as of yet, nothing has been done. Time and time again, evidence has shown that the current space allotted to these students groups is not sufficient for running productive meetings and does not support the diversity of MSU student life. The current MCC is hidden in the basement of the Union – a space might I add that is hardly accessible. Similarly, the COPS groups are neglected into a small space on the fourth floor of the Union – room 441. This office has one meeting space, and three small back offices. However, this space houses five COPS groups.

It can be further argued that the Union – although at many Universities, their student Union buildings are meant for benefitting students, our Union is unfriendly towards student groups, preferring to make a profit from outside organizations than to allow students to use the space. (Minus a one and a half hour time slot that is free to students after business hours on the third floor – which can only be used once during a week before that student group is expected to pay money out of pocket in order to use those rooms). Why is it that the commercial gain of the university outweighs the interests of its students?

As a past president of Women’s Council, a COPS group, I can speak personally to the fact that the COPS groups need more space! At our first meeting of Fall semester, we had over 55 people attend. We were cramped and many people were turned away from continuing their attendance because of the fear that they would be forced to sit on the floor, like they did at their first meeting. If we had a larger space, we could reach many more students dedicated to ending sexism and sexist exploitation. There needs to be a space on this campus to promote and support racial, ethnic and progressive students and the unique issues and circumstances they face on a college campus.

President Lou Anna K. Simon said it best in her State of the University Address in February of 2007, “Across the nation and here in Michigan, structural social inequalities persist. These inequalities result in tangible disparities in things like income levels and access to quality education and health care, and intangible disparities like reduced expectations and respect. They are insidious because they limit individual dreams and collective innovation. We must commit ourselves to reversing these trends. In times like these, universities must step up to help lead us forward. It is our thinkers and visionaries who can help chart the course to greater prosperity… And it is persistent commitment to equal opportunity and inclusion that will provide the cultural and global competence citizens need in the 21st century.” Administrators of Michigan State can tote their phrases about being dedicated to diversity all they want, but the truth is, many are ignoring the marginalization of the multicultural and progressive students on this campus. It is more important now than ever before to show our true dedication to maintaining a safe, friendly and diverse environment on campus since the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. We must have a visible, viable, and school supported multicultural focus – not one that forces multicultural groups into basements and “attics.”

I propose that in order to solve the inadequate amount of space and literal separation of likeminded groups on campus, that we all work together to find a space/building that would be more useful and central for the use of student organizations. It is difficult to create any cohesive inter-group work on campus if we do not have a common space that is friendly to our efforts. If we had everything in one building, it would be more efficient and would foster a better community of cross-communication and working with one another to host programs, events on campus and create a positive environment for all students.

Thank you for your time, and please take these concerns to heart. Do not ignore the requests of students who are already marginalized in many cases.

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments. My email is weisslyd@msu.edu.

Sincerely,


Lydia Weiss
“A concerned MSU Student”
Sociology
Concentration in Women, Gender, Social Justice
Senior

The Lessons of the Weather Underground

Former student radical Mark Rudd explains where he went wrong—and how young people today can learn from his mistakes.

By Te-Ping Chen | January 29, 2008 | Click here to read the original article and comments on Campus Progress.


Activist Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), addresses students at Columbia University, May 3, 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the middle of a soliloquy on the challenges of student organizing, Mark Rudd, former national secretary for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—a radical student organization that in the 1960s boasted a membership of about 100,000—surprised me. “Have you ever been in love?” he asked abruptly. Startled, I hesitantly responded, “Yes.” “Me too,” he told me. “Only I was in love with a country.”

According to Rudd, that emotion pushed him to do crazy things. Though SDS was founded in 1962 as a nonviolent organization, with race riots brewing in America’s major cities in 1969 Rudd and several other SDS leaders began agitating for militant action. They formed a militant faction, the Weathermen, which eventually renounced SDS and emerged as the radical guerilla organization the Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground set its sights on the revolutionary overthrow of the United States government. Its members preached sacrifice of privilege and solidarity with anti-racist struggles from Vietnam to America’s ghettos. As one of its leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, said, “White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.” During the 1970s, the Weather Underground staged over a dozen bombings at sites ranging from the New York police department to the Pentagon. Aside from one accidental detonation that killed three Weathermen, the group did not inflict any casualties.

Today, Rudd is unsparing in his critique of the organization he helped found. “It was juvenile, it was less than juvenile,” Rudd said. Though the Weather Underground gained rapid notoriety for its views, the group, Rudd argues, helped pave the way for the unmaking of the student left. By discarding SDS and pursuing militancy, says Rudd, the Weather Underground abandoned the basic principle of any strong political movement: a commitment to organizing. According to Rudd, this is a legacy that persists in contemporary student movements. Failure to do the hard work of organizing, Rudd said, is what continues to hold progressive students back today, even as they try to piece together new methods of political engagement.

* * *

Though Rudd is cynical about much of his tenure as a student leader, one period of time for him remains untarnished: his years at Columbia University from 1965-1968.

Growing up in New Jersey as the grandson of Jewish immigrants who believed America could do no wrong, it was a shock for Rudd when he crossed the Hudson River and came in contact with his peers’ anti-racist, anti-imperialist critique of America. Rudd watched student uprisings taking place from France to Mexico to China—the world seemed poised on the brink of global revolution, and Rudd wanted to join in.

At the time, Rudd said, SDS—including members who would become part of the Weather Underground—was defined by its commitment to base-building. Dorm-storming, canvassing and teach-ins were staples of the organization’s constant education and recruitment. “We had circles of hundreds and hundreds [of supporters], and the circles grew and grew,” said Rudd, who became Columbia's chapter chair in 1968. “That was the essence of what we were always doing: growth.”

When the Tet Offensive and assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. shocked the nation, SDS had a broad and ready base. That April, Rudd led hundreds of students in the seizure of several university buildings in the legendary 1968 Columbia strike, which eventually drew the overwhelming support of the university's students and faculty. The strike—which lasted the rest of the academic year—ignited headlines nationwide and gave rise to other campus protests under the Ché Guevara-inspired slogan, “One, two, many Columbias!” (Meanwhile, other young activists were protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an effort chronicled in the new film “Chicago 10,” which Campus Progress screened at recent events in Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C.)

After the strike, Rudd was expelled. He began traveling across the country as an SDS organizer, and became increasingly convinced of the need for further militant action. At the SDS convention the following year, Rudd and 10 other SDS members presented a paper advocating armed struggle, entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” They argued that it was the responsibility of white, middle-class youth to sacrifice their privileged positions and unite in the "Third World"'s struggle by bringing the anti-imperialist, anti-racist war to the United States.

“We thought the bolder we were, the more people would want to join us,” Rudd said.

They were wrong. In 1969, the Weathermen called for “working-class, revolutionary” youth to “fight the pigs” in Chicago on the second anniversary of Guevara’s death, an event the press expectantly dubbed the “Days of Rage.” Though Rudd and his compatriots hoped an angry mob of thousands would converge in Chicago, only several hundred showed up. The band worked diligently to create chaos, smashing windows and assaulting police officers, but the event fell far short of the apocalyptic tide of violence the Weathermen anticipated.

“That would’ve been the moment to say, hey, this isn’t working,” said Rudd, who lived for seven and a half years as a federal fugitive during his time with the Weather Underground, working menial jobs from New Mexico to New York and living under an assumed name. “Anyone logical would’ve realized. But we were idealists, and we rationalized it.” From their first radio-broadcast declaration of war to the series of ponderous communiqués the group subsequently authored, the Weather Underground continued to prefer self-expression to political action. “Our idea of organizing,” said Rudd waspishly, “was running down the street waving an NLF [Nationalist Liberation Front] flag.”

“People only get won over through person-to-person engagement, not through spectacle,” Rudd said. “But self-expression is not the same as organizing. The problem is very few people today know this simple truth.” Though the Weather Underground’s leaders’ flair for theatrics made for tantalizing media headlines (and the riveting, though conspicuously indulgent 2002 documentary The Weather Underground), their political posturing did little more than alienate the anti-war movement and give the Nixon administration further leeway to impugn the student left. And while the group tried to take on a mantle of sacrifice for America’s racially oppressed, the Black Panther Party’s Fred Hampton characterized the Weathermen as “opportunistic, individualistic, anarchistic, and Custer-istic.”

Worse still, Rudd said, their actions undermined the strength of the leftist student movement he and others had worked so hard to build. In the wake of the 1969 convention, the SDS imploded in a paroxysm of factionalism. “I’m not at all proud of that,” said Rudd, who today lives as a retired community college teacher in New Mexico. His federal charges were dropped after he surfaced in 1978—the government had used too many illegal tactics trying to track him down to successfully prosecute him.

* * *

Fast forward 40 years and the student left has yet to reclaim the power that was scattered with SDS’s demise, according to Rudd. While his generation grew up learning from the Civil Rights Movement and the labor movement, today’s youth, Rudd argues, lack instruction on how to do the hard work of person-to-person organizing. Instead, contemporary youth are left with the iconographic photos of protests from the sixties—and little understanding of the work that inspired such protests in the first place.

After all, the images of protests that arouse such nostalgia today do not reflect the realities of organizing in the 1960s, Rudd agrued. Though civil disobedience, sit-ins, and strikes received publicity, such actions were only the face of the substantive education and recruitment happening beneath the surface. At Columbia, for example, the milling masses of protestors “really only came out of four years of hard organizing,” Rudd said. “People today still don’t understand that.”

When I brought up Thomas Friedman’s “Generation Q” article—which lambasted my generation as a too-quiet political force content to voice our politics through mouse clicks—Rudd immediately latched onto the topic. With the rise of the Internet, communication tools for the contemporary generation are more accessible than ever, yet with a lack of models to turn to, the real cornerstones of movement-building are missing, Rudd argued.

So who or what should students today turn to? Read Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Rudd said. Read about Ella Baker and how she inspired people by teaching them about their own power. The key to action, Rudd argued, is organizing.

Today, high school and college students across the nation are taking that message in hand, reviving SDS and kick-starting its legacy for the 21st century. Since the group was officially re-launched in January 2006, SDS has expanded to over 100 college campuses and dozens of high schools.

Though the new SDS pays homage to its predecessor of the 1960s in name, the groups’ similarities end there. While the old SDS was structured along strict hierarchical lines, the new SDS operates as a decentralized network united by a boots-on-the-ground attitude that emphasizes local action and chapter autonomy. Chapters share an anti-war focus but remain committed to diverse campaigns, tackling a variety of issues from student fees to immigrant rights.

As an organization, members say, SDS remains committed to building a broad coalition of progressive students and avoiding the internal power struggles that haunted its previous incarnation. At Lewis and Clark College, 20-year-old member Guy Dobbs said, the chapter rotates meeting facilitators and has a strict commitment to sharing authority. Above all, building a strong base of activists is key. “[The old SDS] leaders lost faith in the ability of mass movements and turned inward on themselves,” said Dobbs. “My hope is that the new SDS will continue to grow and reach out.”

But achieving these goals isn’t easy. “It’s pretty hard to get people to engage in this kind of [organizing] work,” said Elena Blanc, a member of Reed College’s SDS. “It seems ideas about what it means to build a movement and to build power through popular support have been forgotten.” Because much of the work in recent years has been focused on single issues—like environmentalism or women’s rights—it’s easy for students to feel disconnected, Blanc said. In particular, the ubiquity of online activism has contributed to a sense of powerlessness, she argued, “because it hasn’t really engaged people, they have no control or investment in it, and it’s not helping them developing their own leadership skills.”

Meanwhile, Rudd argues, the rise of the Internet and a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry have simultaneously encouraged youth to define themselves by their consumer choices, not their politics. Today’s youth are “just stuck in their countercultural niches,” Rudd said: “I’m hardcore punk, I’m west-coast hip-hop, I’m nouveau punk, and so on.” Rudd argues that clinging to such identities—what he calls, quoting Freud, the “narcissism of small differences”—keeps youth voices trapped in the entertainment world and invisible in the political realm.

“The students today are barely starting [to organize] and they need models,” Rudd said. “The advantage at Columbia was, we were red-diaper babies and many of us had been involved in the civil rights movement.”

If students had a better sense of their own power, it would be possible to restart another broad-based student movement like SDS, Blanc argues. “Students do care, and they know what’s going on,” she said, cautioning against mistaking lack of action for apathy. From her experience in college, though, “they don’t really see any way that they can impact [the system], and so they stop engaging and don’t act, because otherwise it’s just too frustrating.”

But fear of failure, Rudd believes, isn’t license to look away. “This country is like a giant aircraft carrier, and you’re trying to change the direction, and it’ll take generations, but you’ve got to start!” he said. “[It’s] nearly impossible, but…has to be done.”

Looking back after 40 years, Rudd said that they only thing he is "really proud" about "is having been a part of the anti-war movement, in which millions were involved." He added: "To the extent that anything I did worked against the student left, or destroyed SDS—those are some of my biggest shames.”

But Rudd acknowledges that his generation’s time is over. These days, Rudd said, he’s a liberal Democrat, not a radical. “I think being a radical’s a lot better than being liberal,” he told me. “I just don’t have the energy anymore.”

“I had my heart broken by this country,” he said, “and so could you.”

Te-Ping Chen is a senior at Brown University.