Stop SFSU spying

ALTHOUGH IT'S NOT as famous for student activism as UC Berkeley is, San Francisco State University has been a hotbed of political protest for decades. And the school's administration has a long history of responding badly to student protests (going all the way back to S.I. Hayakawa and the 1968 student strike).

So it's disturbing to learn that the SFSU campus police are covertly videotaping student protests – and refusing to release the tapes. As Camille T. Taiara reports on page 13, police chief Kim Wible admitted in a sworn deposition that the school routinely uses undercover officers to tape demonstrations and rallies – just in case there's some sort of violence or illegal activity. That conflicts with the policies of both the UC Berkeley and San Francisco police departments, who say they tape First Amendment activities only when there's a good reason to believe laws may be broken.

Those limits are in place for a good reason: it's intimidating for any protesters – and particularly students – to think that the government is listening in on and recording everything they say and do. For Arab and Muslim students (who were the focus of some of SFSU's recent videotapes) that fear is increasingly palpable: in the post-9/11 climate, it's not hard to believe that the Department of Homeland Security is keeping track of Muslim activists who dare to criticize Bush administration policies.

SFSU authorities refuse to release their policies on political surveillance. They refuse to release the videotapes. And they refuse to say what will happen to those tapes. (Are they destroyed? Turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Shared with other government agencies? Kept as part of a student's file?) This is a disgrace and a sign of the arrogance and the lack of public accountability of the SFSU administration.

SFSU president Robert Corrigan needs to direct the campus police to cease the surveillance and adopt new guidelines that ban routine spying on student protests. If he doesn't do that, the state legislature should consider a formal ban on police spying at any California campus.