Huh?

UPDATE (1 PM): Cambridge Common knows more and has some discomfiting stories. I think there are two issues here; the first is the macro question, of whether HUPD and the authorities create an environment that welcomes dissent. (Fairly obviously not.) The second is the micro question, of whether our privacy rights are being directly violated, and whether (this seems to be the ACLU's concern) information is being fed by HUPD to the federal government, specifically the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. This second one is the potentially explosive issue we should focus on.

Nothing yet on the MA-ACLU website, I'll try to keep an eye on it. Hopefully this won't be a one-day story.

Crimson:

The nation’s preeminent civil liberties group is accusing the University of maintaining a political intelligence unit within the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), an allegation that comes after two protesters were arrested during a demonstration in the Square.

The protesters allege that undercover HUPD officers were photographing the demonstration, according to John Reinstein, the legal director of the Massachusetts division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“What we found really quite surprising and disturbing is that the Harvard police department has an undercover, plainclothes, political intelligence unit which so far as I know has never been acknowledged by them before,” Reinstein said.

...Reinstein said that the ACLU has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to discover whether Harvard shares the intelligence it gathers with the federal government. Other schools have connections with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), local teams of law enforcement and intelligence specialists formed to investigate terrorism...

Reinstein said that Nieves noticed a bystander in plainclothes taking photos of the protest and decided to go photograph him. When she did, the man informed her that he was an undercover police officer with HUPD and placed her under arrest for refusing to delete the photos. Kearney said that the officer would have to arrest him if he was going to arrest Nieves and so Kearney was also arrested, according to both Fam and Reinstein.

“It’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property,” Fam said.

WTF? Has anybody heard anything about this? I know Katie posted some questions back in March when those people got arrested, but... the ACLU? "Political intelligence"? The FBI? This is some weirdness. If HUPD (a private organization paid for by our tuition) is secretly monitoring student activism on behalf of the federal government, that's pretty obviously unacceptable...