This entertaining five minute video discusses the legality of the government’s current domestic mass surveillance program, making the case that it invades our privacy and places an unconstitutional chilling effect upon First Amendment speech and political association. Brought to you by Fight for the Future and Demand Progress.
Category Archives: First Amendment
In NSA-Intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outnumber the Foreigners Who Are
Files provided by Snowden show extent to which ordinary Web users are caught in the net
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
Related Story: Communication Breakdown (How 160,000 intercepted conversations led to The Post’s latest NSA story)
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.
A composite image of two of the more than 5,000 private photos among data collected by the National Security Agency from online accounts and network links in the United States. The images were included in a large cache of NSA intercepts provided by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. (Images obtained by The Washington Post)
Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.
No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.
Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
“None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance. “No additional information,” writes a civilian analyst. Another makes fun of a suspected kidnapper, newly arrived in Syria before the current civil war, who begs for employment as a janitor and makes wide-eyed observations about the state of undress displayed by women on local beaches.
By law, the NSA may “target” only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based on probable cause from a special surveillance court. For collection under PRISM and Upstream rules, analysts must state a reasonable belief that the target has information of value about a foreign government, a terrorist organization or the spread of nonconventional weapons.
Most of the people caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as such. “Incidental collection” of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, but in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. In criminal wiretaps, for example, the FBI is supposed to stop listening to a call if a suspect’s wife or child is using the phone.
There are many ways to be swept up incidentally in surveillance aimed at a valid foreign target. Some of those in the Snowden archive were monitored because they interacted directly with a target, but others had more-tenuous links.
If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply “lurked,” reading passively what other people wrote.
“1 target, 38 others on there,” one analyst wrote. She collected data on them all.
In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people.
The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers. Raj De, the agency’s general counsel, has testified that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.
The Obama administration declines to discuss the scale of incidental collection. The NSA, backed by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., has asserted that it is unable to make any estimate, even in classified form, of the number of Americans swept in. It is not obvious why the NSA could not offer at least a partial count, given that its analysts routinely pick out “U.S. persons” and mask their identities, in most cases, before distributing intelligence reports.
If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
‘He didn’t get this data’
U.S. intelligence officials declined to confirm or deny in general terms the authenticity of the intercepted content provided by Snowden, but they made off-the-record requests to withhold specific details that they said would alert the targets of ongoing surveillance. Some officials, who declined to be quoted by name, described Snowden’s handling of the sensitive files as reckless.
In an interview, Snowden said “primary documents” offered the only path to a concrete debate about the costs and benefits of Section 702 surveillance. He did not favor public release of the full archive, he said, but he did not think a reporter could understand the programs “without being able to review some of that surveillance, both the justified and unjustified.”
“While people may disagree about where to draw the line on publication, I know that you and The Post have enough sense of civic duty to consult with the government to ensure that the reporting on and handling of this material causes no harm,” he said.
In Snowden’s view, the PRISM and Upstream programs have “crossed the line of proportionality.”
“Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders,” he added, “their continued storage in government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?”
For close to a year, NSA and other government officials have appeared to deny, in congressional testimony and public statements, that Snowden had any access to the material.
As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.
“He didn’t get this data,” Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. “They didn’t touch —”
“The operational data?” the reporter asked.
“They didn’t touch the FISA data,” Alexander replied. He added, “That database, he didn’t have access to.”
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about “raw” intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.
“We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic, the training that people have to have, the technological lockdowns on access,” Litt said. “Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”
In the interview, Snowden said he did not need to circumvent those controls, because his final position as a contractor for Booz Allen at the NSA’s Hawaii operations center gave him “unusually broad, unescorted access to raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] under a special ‘Dual Authorities’ role,” a reference to Section 702 for domestic collection and Executive Order 12333 for collection overseas. Those credentials, he said, allowed him to search stored content — and “task” new collection — without prior approval of his search terms.
“If I had wanted to pull a copy of a judge’s or a senator’s e-mail, all I had to do was enter that selector into XKEYSCORE,” one of the NSA’s main query systems, he said.
The NSA has released an e-mail exchange acknowledging that Snowden took the required training classes for access to those systems.
‘Minimized U.S. president’
At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
More than 1,000 distinct “minimization” terms appear in the files, attempting to mask the identities of “possible,” “potential” and “probable” U.S. persons, along with the names of U.S. beverage companies, universities, fast-food chains and Web-mail hosts.
Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years.
Even so, unmasked identities remain in the NSA’s files, and the agency’s policy is to hold on to “incidentally” collected U.S. content, even if it does not appear to contain foreign intelligence.
In one exchange captured in the files, a young American asks a Pakistani friend in late 2009 what he thinks of the war in Afghanistan. The Pakistani replies that it is a religious struggle against 44 enemy states.
Startled, the American says “they, ah, they arent heavily participating . . . its like . . . in a football game, the other team is the enemy, not the other teams waterboy and cheerleaders.”
“No,” the Pakistani shoots back. “The ther teams water boy is also an enemy. it is law of our religion.”
“haha, sorry thats kind of funny,” the American replies.
When NSA and allied analysts really want to target an account, their concern for U.S. privacy diminishes. The rationales they use to judge foreignness sometimes stretch legal rules or well-known technical facts to the breaking point.
In their classified internal communications, colleagues and supervisors often remind the analysts that PRISM and Upstream collection have a “lower threshold for foreignness ‘standard of proof’ ” than a traditional surveillance warrant from a FISA judge, requiring only a “reasonable belief” and not probable cause.
One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans. Others are allowed to presume that anyone on the chat “buddy list” of a known foreign national is also foreign.
In many other cases, analysts seek and obtain approval to treat an account as “foreign” if someone connects to it from a computer address that seems to be overseas. “The best foreignness explanations have the selector being accessed via a foreign IP address,” an NSA supervisor instructs an allied analyst in Australia.
Apart from the fact that tens of millions of Americans live and travel overseas, additional millions use simple tools called proxies to redirect their data traffic around the world, for business or pleasure. World Cup fans this month have been using a browser extension called Hola to watch live-streamed games that are unavailable from their own countries. The same trick is routinely used by Americans who want to watch BBC video. The NSA also relies routinely on locations embedded in Yahoo tracking cookies, which are widely regarded by online advertisers as unreliable.
In an ordinary FISA surveillance application, the judge grants a warrant and requires a fresh review of probable cause — and the content of collected surveillance — every 90 days. When renewal fails, NSA and allied analysts sometimes switch to the more lenient standards of PRISM and Upstream.
“These selectors were previously under FISA warrant but the warrants have expired,” one analyst writes, requesting that surveillance resume under the looser standards of Section 702. The request was granted.
‘I don’t like people knowing’
She was 29 and shattered by divorce, converting to Islam in search of comfort and love. He was three years younger, rugged and restless. His parents had fled Kabul and raised him in Australia, but he dreamed of returning to Afghanistan.
One day when she was sick in bed, he brought her tea. Their faith forbade what happened next, and later she recalled it with shame.
“what we did was evil and cursed and may allah swt MOST merciful forgive us for giving in to our nafs [desires]”
Still, a romance grew. They fought. They spoke of marriage. They fought again.
All of this was in the files because, around the same time, he went looking for the Taliban.
He found an e-mail address on its English-language Web site and wrote repeatedly, professing loyalty to the one true faith, offering to “come help my brothers” and join the fight against the unbelievers.
On May 30, 2012, without a word to her, he boarded a plane to begin a journey to Kandahar. He left word that he would not see her again.
If that had been the end of it, there would not be more than 800 pages of anguished correspondence between them in the archives of the NSA and its counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate.
He had made himself a target. She was the collateral damage, placed under a microscope as she tried to adjust to the loss.
Three weeks after he landed in Kandahar, she found him on Facebook.
“Im putting all my pride aside just to say that i will miss you dearly and your the only person that i really allowed myself to get close to after losing my ex husband, my dad and my brother.. Im glad it was so easy for you to move on and put what we had aside and for me well Im just soo happy i met you. You will always remain in my heart. I know you left for a purpose it hurts like hell sometimes not because Im needy but because i wish i could have been with you.”
His replies were cool, then insulting, and gradually became demanding. He would marry her but there were conditions. She must submit to his will, move in with his parents and wait for him in Australia. She must hand him control of her Facebook account — he did not approve of the photos posted there.
She refused. He insisted:
“look in islam husband doesnt touch girl financial earnings unless she agrees but as far as privacy goes there is no room….i need to have all ur details everything u do its what im supposed to know that will guide u whether its right or wrong got it”
Later, she came to understand the irony of her reply:
“I don’t like people knowing my private life.”
Months of negotiations followed, with each of them declaring an end to the romance a dozen times or more. He claimed he had found someone else and planned to marry that day, then admitted it was a lie. She responded:
“No more games. You come home. You won’t last with an afghan girl.”
She begged him to give up his dangerous path. Finally, in September, she broke off contact for good, informing him that she was engaged to another man.
“When you come back they will send you to jail,” she warned.
They almost did.
In interviews with The Post, conducted by telephone and Facebook, she said he flew home to Australia last summer, after failing to find members of the Taliban who would take him seriously. Australian National Police met him at the airport and questioned him in custody. They questioned her, too, politely, in her home. They showed her transcripts of their failed romance. When a Post reporter called, she already knew what the two governments had collected about her.
Eventually, she said, Australian authorities decided not to charge her failed suitor with a crime. Police spokeswoman Emilie Lovatt declined to comment on the case.
Looking back, the young woman said she understands why her intimate correspondence was recorded and parsed by men and women she did not know.
“Do I feel violated?” she asked. “Yes. I’m not against the fact that my privacy was violated in this instance, because he was stupid. He wasn’t thinking straight. I don’t agree with what he was doing.”
What she does not understand, she said, is why after all this time, with the case long closed and her own job with the Australian government secure, the NSA does not discard what it no longer needs.
Jennifer Jenkins and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
Barton Gellman writes for the national staff. He has contributed to three Pulitzer Prizes for The Washington Post, most recently the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Freedom of the Press
This episode of Crash Course in Government and Politics provides a general overview of the First Amendment’s freedom of the press. Like an individual’s right to free speech, the press has a right, and arguably an ethical responsibility, to tell the public what the government is doing. But there are some complications in doing so, such as if that information will compromise national security or wrongfully discredit an individual. When considering Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures or Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, it’s just as important as ever to understand the role of the press in informing the public as well as our role as citizens in staying informed.
Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios
Freedom of Speech
This episode of Crash Course in Politics provides a general overview of your First Amendment right to free speech. Theoretically, this right allows you to critique the government without fear of retaliation. But it’s essential to remember that not ALL speech is protected equally under the First Amendment, and it only applies to the government. Therefore, just because you have a right to free speech doesn’t mean your private employer, for instance, can’t fire you for something you say (unless your work for the government and then things get a bit more complicated). Discussed are significant Supreme Court cases that have brought us to our current definition of free speech, and some of the more controversial aspects of free speech – like hate speech.
Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios
Revealed: The Activists Who Uncovered the FBI’s Covert CoIntelPro Counter-Surveillance Program
On March 8, 1971, a group of eight anti-war activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and removed every document they found. The group later leaked the removed documents to the press, revealing the FBI’s covert counter-intelligence program, CoIntelPro, designed to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements. Documents also revealed a mass surveillance campaign being conducted against politicians, celebrities and prominent social leaders. These discoveries led the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigation which put an end to the program and led to reforms in the FBI’s domestic security investigations.
Despite FBI director J. Edgar Hoover assigning 200 agents to investigate the burglary, the FBI was never able to determine the identities of the activists responsible for the break-in. In January 2014, the former activists identities were finally revealed by Betty Medsger, the former Washington Post reporter responsible for breaking the story in 1971, in her book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews three of the original activists; John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth, along with their their attorney, David Kairys. The former activists discuss how they planned and executed the break-in, and how they managed to keep their identities hidden all these years. Also discussed is the FBI smear campaign against the outspoken Hollywood actress Jane Seberg; the suicide letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. by the FBI; and the assassination of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton. Their story is relevant now more than ever amidst revelations about the current domestic surveillance abuses and the FBI’s entrapment tactics and informant culture which many critics believe has led to a manufactured war on terror.
Noam Chomsky: Corporate Assault on Public Education (2012)
Synopsis: Noam Chomsky delivered his lecture on the goals of Public Education on March 16, 2012, at St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, NY. Chomsky discusses the longstanding tradition of utilizing public education as a means of breeding civic passivity and conformity, while discouraging free and independent thought. Chomsky sets forth the premise that the ruling class utilizes public education to naturalize individuals into the established corporate ethos and to dissuade them from challenging the dominant ideology and economic structure. Chomsky cuts through the political rhetoric with a detailed historical analysis of the Western practice of using social institutions to indoctrinate the young.
Gary Webb: The Suppression of Uncomfortable Inquiries
Gary Webb was an award winning investigative journalist who is best known for his 1996 series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, entitled “Dark Alliance.” The series exposed a crack-cocaine drug trafficking ring operated by associates of the Nicaraguan Contra Rebels, acting with the knowledge and protection of the CIA, which extended from Los Angeles, CA, to the Midwestern United States. Continue reading Gary Webb: The Suppression of Uncomfortable Inquiries
Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-Profits
November 20, 2013 · by · in Corporate Espionage
News Release
For Immediate Release: Wednesday, November 20, 2013
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (202) 387-8030
Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits
Giant corporations are employing highly unethical or illegal tools of espionage against nonprofit organizations with near impunity, according to a new report by Essential Information. The report, titled Spooky Business, documents how corporations hire shady investigative firms staffed with former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), US military, Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Secret Service and local police departments to target nonprofit organizations.
“Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is an egregious abuse of corporate power that is subverting democracy,” said Gary Ruskin, author of Spooky Business. “Who will rein in the forces of corporate lawlessness as they bear down upon nonprofit defenders of justice?”
Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON – have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.
Many different types of nonprofit organizations have been targeted with corporate espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups.
Corporations and their trade associations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics against nonprofit organizations. The most prevalent tactic appears to be infiltration by posing a volunteer or journalist, to obtain information from a nonprofit. But corporations have been linked to many other human, physical and electronic espionage tactics against nonprofits. Many of these tactics are either highly unethical or illegal.
Founded in 1982 by Ralph Nader, Essential Information is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. It is involved in a variety of projects to promote corporate accountability, a more just economy, public health and a sustainable planet. It has published a bi-monthly magazine, books and reports, sponsored conferences, provided writers with grants to pursue investigations, published daily news summaries, operated clearinghouses that disseminate information to grassroots organizations in the United States and developing countries worldwide, and has hosted scores of conferences focusing on government and corporate accountability.
More information about Essential Information can be found at: www.essential.org,
More information about the Center for Corporate Policy can be found at: www.corporatepolicy.org.
A pdf version of Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits can be found at: http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf.
Click to access spookybusiness.pdf
The Right to Record
In this age of citizen activism, recording devices, such as cellphones, tabs and digital video/audio recorders are essential tools for collecting evidence and preserving information about conversations, interviews, and phone calls in which you participate. It is also a good way to document what takes place in a court hearing or public meeting, whether for personal reference or later broadcast over news or social media networks. A number of laws affect your ability to use a recording device in these contexts. Here are some practical tips to help you avoid legal trouble when recording conversations, phone calls, public hearings, and protests. Continue reading The Right to Record
Interfaith Dialogue and Higher Education
by S. Alan Ray
In the fall of 2009, I participated in the sixth conference of Interfaith Youth Core, an organization and social movement devoted to building “mutual respect and pluralism among young people from different religious traditions by empowering them to work together to serve others” (IFYC 2010). On that occasion, Dr.Eboo Patel, founder and executive director of Interfaith Youth Core, raised a significant question that has since set me thinking: Given how other social movements have deeply affected curricula, student programming, and institutional priorities, what is the highest aspiration we can set for colleges and universities around interfaith cooperation? As I see it, there are at least two main ways to understand and respond to this excellent question.
Model one: Interfaith cooperation as participation in a zero-sum game
The question can be understood to assume that interfaith cooperation is a social movement, like the racial equality–based civil rights movements in the United States in the 1960s and the feminist, gay rights, and disability rights movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. As interfaith cooperation comes on the academic scene in the twenty-first century, it must compete with institutional norms and practices established by these predecessor social movements. In an environment where other social movements have significantly affected university curricula, programming, and priorities, the question goes, what is the highest aspiration for proponents of interfaith cooperation? Here, “highest aspiration” means something like “maximum effect.”
In the highly occupied social terrain of our day, this model presents a kind of zero-sum game, where interfaith cooperation achieves its impact by displacing the effects of other social movements. Those effects are highly secular but, say some, they conduce to the common good in a way faith-based effects do not. Secular practices admit of no special pleading by religious adherents, who are perceived to be seeking to smuggle in private or parochial agendas that are unrelated to the public good. Thus, on this model, if one creates a place for interfaith cooperation in a college or university, one does so against competing agendas and philosophies and by displacing them to some extent. Those (secular) competitors are styled as rational, while faith of any kind is positioned as irrational; or, as objectively valued discourses versus subjectively espoused faith statements; or, as truth claims subject to public warrants and criteria of verification versus truth claims subject to verification by so-called “religious feelings,” or dogmas and doctrines based on supposed divine revelations.
In this zero-sum strategic vision of interfaith dialogue on campuses, if different religious faiths cooperate, it is in part due to a common enemy or enemies—rationalism, reductionist explanations of religion, perhaps materialism. At the level of tactics, public display of differences between faiths may be suppressed for strategic reasons or emphasized, depending on whether it is helpful or hurtful to signal the specificity of one’s religious tradition. Also within this model are overtly faith-based colleges or universities, enclaves of quite particular religious missions, that go about their work in a wholly different episteme or master frame than that utilized by nonreligious colleges and universities. Assuming, however, that we are talking about the penetration of interfaith activities onto a so-called secular campus, what is the most one may hope for? In such a situation, the highest aspiration is to acquire strategic space within the curriculum, within student organizations and other platforms, and within the administration in order to advance the cause of interfaith dialogue.
We have seen this model of religious “strangers” in a secular “strange land” played out time and again in the post-Enlightenment history of liberal education, but perhaps never with the intensity and polarization of the last forty years. Departments of religious studies, if they exist and their content is not dispersed to other departments in the humanities and social sciences, are problematic creatures, viewed with suspicion if not derision by their more “scientific” peers. Academic departments of theology would be a contradiction in terms. Support for student cocurriculum and activities, and administrators charged with overseeing student life, are viewed skeptically if their content or mission includes faith-based organizations.
Why is this so? The civil rights movement of Dr. King, Rabbi Heschel, Elmhurst College’s own alumni Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, and countless others was informed and drew strength from the words of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. The work of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who inspired millions through a life of “contemplation in a world of action,” vividly embodied Catholic social justice teaching and the authoritative statements of Vatican Council II.
Yet through ethnic studies, women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, intercultural studies, indigenous persons studies, critical race theory—all marvelous additions to American university life, in my view—the social movements of the last forty years have left their mark on the academy in a profoundly secular way. It is as though the rejection of religious belief as a relevant frame for truth-seeking is the price of admission to the academy and of acceptance as an interdisciplinary exploration or a free-standing department. Thus is inter-faith cooperation mooted as a legitimate resource for the core work of academic life.
An example of this model in action is my own graduate school alma mater, Harvard University. In 2006, Harvard flirted with the idea of requiring its undergraduates to take a course in a category called Faith and Reason. The Preliminary Report of the Task Force on General Education (2006) contained the recommendation, but it was ultimately not adopted. I view this as unfortunate, since the major faith traditions are conspicuously playing an increasingly pivotal role in world and domestic affairs. Rarely if ever has faith been less “private” and more a legitimate part of the public discourse—even, indeed especially, on university campuses. Yet, interfaith cooperation remains marginal to the intellectual enterprise of this most famous of research universities, even as the university itself acknowledges religion’s importance to the lives of the vast majority of Harvard’s students. As the Report of the Task Force on General Education states, “Religion has historically been, and continues to be, a force shaping identity and behavior throughout the world. Harvard is a secular institution, but religion is an important part of our students’ lives” (2007, 11). Harvard’s Pluralism Project, under the extraordinary leadership of Professor Diana Eck, has long served as an example of vibrant interreligious dialogue and learning. However, because the university as a “secular institution” functions within the model of intereligious dialogue as a zero-sum game, speech and conduct denominated as religious will inevitably yield pride of place (and funds and prestige) to ostensively nonreligious discourse and practices, thus refracting religious studies among the disciplines and marginalizing or inadequately integrating statements by religious adherents about themselves or the world.
To appreciate the frustrating effects that cabining off discussion of religious issues qua religious can have, one need only read a recent story in the Harvard Crimson, the university’s award-winning student newspaper, entitled, “Religious Discussion Desired”:
“Challenges to Faith at Harvard,” a panel discussion moderated by the Harvard Political Union last night, examined the social and intellectual pressures that influence undergraduates’ religious life.
The panelists and audience were in agreement that more religious discourse should occur on campus in order to incorporate the diversity of religious viewpoints. Many of the panelists said that Harvard’s climate helped to ground their religious beliefs.”
“At Harvard, I am forced to think about what I believe, and to explain why I believe X, Y, or Z,” said Aneesh V. Kulkarni ’10, a member of Dharma, Harvard’s Hindu organization . . .
However, some panelists said that Harvard’s attitude towards religion is at times problematic. “At Harvard, we are told to think critically about every aspect of our lives, except for faith and religion,” said Stephanie M. Cole ’11, a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship . . .
The panelists in turn said that pluralism is included in each religious tradition.
“You don’t have to agree to a certain political opinion in order to be a member of the Catholic Student Association,” said Katherine J. Calle ’10. “The expression two Jews, four opinions is a good one, I think,” said Jason W. Schnier ’11, a member of Hillel.(Dibella 2009)
The “challenges to faith” described above are not limited to Harvard, but arise on most campuses where interfaith dialogue is seen as a competitor to nonreligious discourse and practices. Is there a way to bring interfaith cooperation more into the arena of academic discussion, without doing violence to the precepts of truth-seeking and open inquiry so valued in a secular liberal learning environment?
To move toward an answer, I think one must leave the first model, sketched above, which conceives of the academy as strategically organized zones of competing world views and social practices. Rather, on a second model, Eboo Patel’s question—to what can interfaith cooperation aspire in the academy?—can mean that interfaith cooperation as a social movement inherits a campus cultural environment that has been shaped by decades of specific social movements and their philosophies (of equal rights, due process, tolerance, and other institutional values derived from the Enlightenment). Within this matrix we ask, what is the highest aspiration that proponents of interfaith cooperation can hold and seek to advance?
Model Two: Interfaith cooperation as critical reappropriation of tradition.
This second model eschews stereotypes of the secular and religious, and it recognizes that all faiths, including secularism, are living realities conditioned by multiple cultural currents—currents that affect religious, non-religious, and even antireligious philosophies alike. The abstractions of theologies and of Enlightenment-based philosophies of the person and world are replaced by living individuals and concrete communities, like the Harvard students quoted above, whose members experience a complex world in similar ways. Strategic rationality and gamesmanship are replaced by communicative rationality and dialogue, and by the identification of common problems and threats in the environment. Religious traditions and nonreligious traditions are mined for rhetorical and performative resources—ways to say and do things—that stimulate mutual allegiances across religious boundaries and religious-nonreligious boundaries. Public displays of differences are not suppressed for strategic ends, but rather are subordinated to achieving common objectives through collective action. This is followed by reflection back within one’s tradition (secular or religious) on the meaning of this collective action for adherents of the tradition and, indeed, for the claims of the tradition itself. The critical reappropriation of tradition through reflection on collective action becomes a legitimate academic move, in fact a way of life and self-formation for students as well as for administrators and faculty.
There are four moments in this dialectical model. The first is marked by the creation of robust intrafaith occasions for learning about and interpreting one’s own religious tradition—liturgical, educational, communal, and individual—and inviting alienated or disaffected nominal members to join the conversation. I call this moment charging the batteries. The second moment in the dialectic involves naming issues of concern to the college or university community that are shared among faiths and persons and groups of no faith tradition, and then offering religiously based interpretations of these issues, listening to interpretations offered by those who reject religion or a particular tradition, and doing so on and off campus—indeed potentially around the world. Such issues include, for example, environmental and economic justice, poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia as well as issues related to getting a meaningful job and starting life as a young adult. This second moment, which focuses on engaging in issues-based discussions with all college stakeholders and stakeholders worldwide, can be called issues-based dialogue. Working together to address the issues with all stakeholders and engaging in critically informed social reform—in short, taking collective action—is the third moment. The fourth moment is marked by each stakeholder’s critical exploration of the meaning of this collective action either for one’s own religious tradition and its theologies of self and world, or for one’s own secular tradition and its philosophies of rights and ethical systems. The objective is to educate and to open oneself to the possibility of deep change and thus incipiently to reform those theologies and philosophies themselves. In this final moment, one engages in dialogue aimed at personal change through reflection on collective action—or, in a phrase, self-formation.
Note the model presented above does not strive for a consensus of philosophies or theologies. It begins in the specificity of traditions and returns there, but invites tradition transformation through issues-based dialogue, working together on common problems, and reflection on shared experiences. In short, I believe that our highest aspiration for interfaith cooperation on campus is to create tradition-based opportunities for radical change of self and world, which include the possible transformation of one’s own tradition.
Interfaith dialogue at Elmhurst College
I would like to sketch what my campus has been doing recently to try to achieve that aspiration. But first, a word of framing. Elmhurst College is an affiliate of the United Church of Christ (UCC). In 2008–9, the year I began my presidency, we initiated and completed a broad-based strategic planning process. We named for the first time five core values: intellectual excellence; community; social responsibility; stewardship; and faith, meaning, and values. With regard to the last of these—faith, meaning, and values—we state that “we value the development of the human spirit in its many forms and the exploration of life’s ultimate questions through dialogue and service. We value religious freedom and its expressions on campus. Grounded in our own commitments and traditions as well as those of the UCC, we cherish values that create lives of intellectual excellence, strong community, social responsibility, and committed stewardship” (Elmhurst 2010).
Regarding the first moment of the aspiration to interfaith cooperation, “charging the batteries,” I note that Elmhurst students voluntarily engage in religious services appropriate to their needs and responsive to their religious calendars. These services are coordinated by the college chaplain and numerous cochaplains representing the major faith traditions. For example, recent work has gone into enhancing liturgical and social opportunities for Catholics, who make up 40 percent of the student body. At this UCC-affiliated college we now have monthly Masses, a start-of-the-year Mass, and inclusion of Catholic priests and lay leaders in ceremonial roles at college events such as graduation and baccalaureate. Last year, we reviewed the adequacy of prayer spaces on campus for our Muslim students. We are currently looking for a Buddhist cochaplain. To “charge the batteries” and educate the community, we host annual public lectures focused on major religious traditions: the Al-Ghazali (Muslim), Bernardin (Catholic), Heschel (Jewish), Niebuhr (Protestant) Lectures and an Evangelical Lecture. We honor religious figures whose lives and work align with our mission, such as our award in September 2009 of our highest honor, the Niebuhr Medal, to Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, founder of Latin American liberation theology. And for those students who wish to explore questions of ultimate meaning through intentionally nonreligious frames of thought, we also support a strong and visible secular student association.
As to the second moment of interfaith cooperation, issues-based dialogue, we offer a number of forums for naming and exploring issues of concern to the educational community. Because “where” is often crucial to successful discussions, we moved the office of the chaplain to its own house on campus in order to increase its visibility and to facilitate the creation of sacred space and interfaith conversations. We support a spiritual life council, an interfaith group consisting of and led by students and our chaplain that engages in dialogue on traditional religious questions and issues of social justice. We also administer the Niebuhr Center. Named for our two alumni and funded in part by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, the Niebuhr Center offers students from all faiths the opportunity to explore careers of service, whether as ordained religious leaders or as laypersons. Through the Niebuhr Center and outside it, we offer numerous study abroad opportunities through which students come face to face with world issues and alternate points of view, and we host an increasing number of students from outside the United States who eagerly engage in issues-based dialogue with their American counterparts.
For the past two years, the Niebuhr Center has sponsored events entitled “Sacred Conversations on Race.” Held on campus and at Bethel Green Church, a largely African American congregation in Chicago’s west side, these events bring together members of the Elmhurst College community, church members, and national leaders on race relations to discuss this important topic from Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim perspectives. In the fall of 2010, we will launch the Niebuhr Forum on Religion in Public Life, which will bring prominent writers on religion together with panels of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars and movement leaders to discuss the contemporary salience of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought. In addition, a large and growing number of academic courses—such as our campuswide first-year seminars—and cocurricular student groups focused on world peace, hunger, disease, gender justice, and sexual orientation provide concrete opportunities for students, faculty, and administrators to identify shared issues of concern and to engage in dialogue from their various religious and nonreligious perspectives. Our faculty, chaplain, administrators, and I are also very active in interreligious dialogue throughout the Chicago area and beyond, and we frequently collaborate with Chicago Theological Seminary, a leading progressive Christian voice that shares our affiliation with the UCC.
For the third moment, collective action, the Niebuhr Center is again an example of critically informed work toward social justice. Last fall, we co-organized a rally with Bethel Green Church against gun violence in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. Our students went into the neighborhood to urge residents to attend the service, which featured an impassioned speech by social activist and local pastor Rev. Michael Pfleger.
Liturgy and ceremony can also be moments of collective action. After all, “liturgy” means “the work of the people.” As a Native American and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, I have tried to create occasions for ceremonial engagement by our non-Native community members with members of Chicago’s Anawim Center(a traditional Native American spirituality and service organization), the American Indian Center of Chicago, and other indigenous peoples’ groups including the Cherokee Nation. As part of a week-long Native American Awareness Week, we brought together students, faculty, prominent scholars, and representatives of indigenous peoples’ communities to educate ourselves about the history of colonization in America and, with members of traditional Native American communities, to celebrate their—by which I mean our—religious, political, and cultural self-determination today. A highlight of the week included a traditional smudging ceremony, which was held in our chaplain’s office, conducted by members of the Anawim Center, and attended by students from a variety of traditions—religious and secular.
More than a hundred of our students travel annually to multiple sites around the country to work with Habitat for Humanity, an experience that brings religious and nonreligious students together in the service of the homeless and communities lacking adequate facilities. Finally, the college has embarked on an annual theme-based set of service and education projects. For 2009–10, our focus was on poverty, both worldwide and close to home in DuPage County, and we gave service and educated both the college and the general public in myriad ways throughout the year.
Finally, in the fourth moment of interfaith cooperation, self-formation, our students engage in personal transformation through reflection on their collective action. Back in their spiritual “homes”—whether through the Spiritual Life Council, faith-based groups, or the Secular Students Association; through other meetings of affinity groups; or informally and alone—our students ask themselves what they have learned about their faith and value systems through their many experiences of collective action. For all students, every year, the college will provide what we call the Elmhurst Experience, a model of intentional liberal learning that has student self-formation as one of its two focuses. We are doing this even now through the Big Questions Orientation, an intensive, multiday, small-cohort, new student orientation that asks first-year students to act cooperatively; to reflect on themselves, their world, and their values; and to engage in off-campus service learning, which is followed immediately by their first formal academic experience, the credit-bearing first-year seminar. The first-year seminar brings together the same cohort and the same set of instructors—one faculty member and one staff member—who led the orientation, and the seminar pedagogy, focused on an interesting, interdisciplinary topic, encourages students to take intellectual and social risks and, hopefully, to begin a lifelong love of learning. The college is also focusing on residential campus communities as sites for student self-formation. In terms of sparking interfaith cooperation—or, at least, constructive conflict resolution—few experiences compare to living in residence halls!
Through our recently adopted new program of general education, the Elmhurst Experience will be extended beyond the first year. The new program requires each undergraduate to complete a course in the category Religious Studies in Context, which has replaced a narrower requirement in Judeo-Christian Heritage and Religious Faith. In all these ways and others, Elmhurst College is aspiring to generate opportunities for genuine interfaith dialogue and student self-formation.
The opportunities for changing student lives through changing the world, and changing the world through changing student lives, are immense. The challenges to this work are inherent in a model of higher education that pits religious against secular faiths, thereby marginalizing religion and impoverishing liberal education. An alternative model, which I have sketched here, grounds action in communities of faith and commitment, religious and non-religious, and transforms both communities and their members through collective action and reflection on shared experiences. In such a radically transformative dialogue, anyone and anything may be changed. But a commitment to such deep change, I believe, is a principle that unites rather than divides most religious and secular communities and is, therefore, a cause for optimism.
References
Dibella, G. A. 2009. Religious discussion desired. Harvard Crimson, November 4, www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/4/harvard-religious-member-society.
Elmhurst College. 2009. Elmhurst College strategic plan 2009–2014, http://public.elmhurst.edu/leadership/strategicplan/41162787.html.
Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 2006.Preliminary report of the task force on general education.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University,www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/Gen_Ed_Prelim_Report.pdf.
———. 2007. Report of the task force on general education.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University,www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/General_Education_
Final_Report.pdf.
IFYC. Interfaith Youth Core, www.ifyc.org/about_core.
S. Alan Ray is professor of religion and society and president of Elmhurst College.
A printed copy of this article originally appeared in the American Association of American Colleges & University publication, Liberal Education, Summer 2010, Vol. 96, No. 3
https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/interfaith-dialogue-and-higher-education
Camden Civil Rights Project 