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Monday. October 20,1975
University Daily Kansan
Big Brother's files
The recently-enacted Privacy Act of 1974 may forestall for a short time the Orwellian nightmare of an omnipresent microphone, but it is a far cry from a panacea for governmental snooping into the lives of private citizens.
If a curious individual has the time and energy to work his way through a myriad of regulations, he can learn whether a government agency has a file on him and, if it does, correct any incorrect information it contains. Unfortunately, the law provides for few exceptions. Criminal records, CIA information, investigative material谷gather for law enforcement purposes, residential protection information and certain federal employee data are still closed to the general public.
ALTHOUGH THE LAW will affect more than 850 agencies that keep files on about 8,200 people, it is those agencies that are the ones to be concerned about.
Recent reports show that the FBI conducted an unauthorized domestic spying operation for 39 years; that the agency routinely breaks its own rules by prolonging preliminary investigations, which are supposed to end after 90 days unless a full investigation is cleared with headquarters; that headquarters is unaware of a large percentage of investigations in the field and of little control over them; and that the 676 domestic intelligence cases reviewed by the Internal Accounting Office (GAO), only four convictions were obtained; and that once a file is opened on an individual, it may never be closed even if the individual is later cleared.
THE GAO GAVE several examples of cases that never linked a suspect to any subversive activities, including a high school student who attended the trial of two members of a black extremist boss as having "subversive tendencies." One had gone to Cuba and the other was involved in a union.
The FBI isn't alone in its domestic spying operations. The Rockefeller commission revealed that the CIA maintains files on 57,000 Americans in addition to 800,000 active and inactive security files on individuals connected with the agency in some way, including 75 members of Congress.
THE CIA ALSO conducted operation CHAOS during the late 1980s and early 1970s, planting agents in dissident groups and compiling files on 7,200 Americans trying to confirm President Lyndon Johnson's thoughts that a foreign power was behind the attack on protests; it would put an unhappy agent into the campaign of a congressional candidate to report behind-the-scenes campaign activities.
The latest CIA skeleton to emerge from its closet is the agency's 20-year mail-opening program. The letters of Richard Nixon, the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Arthur Burns, Rep. Bela Abzug, Martin Luther King and Sen. Frank Ch reh's mother-in-law, among others, were illegally read.
THERE IS A FINE line between protecting the national interest and unwarranted invasion of privacy. Going a few steps past that line can be justified in the name of national security, but that justification is now left up to a few men whose discretion can easily be clouded by their closeness to the job.
Regular congressional supervision by a single disinterested committee is needed. Although the FBI and CIA maintain that they can't do their work if they are continually monitored, a system that safeguards both the clandestine counterfeiters and the privacy of individuals can be worked out. If the Little Pest is to be kept from growing up into the predicted Big Brother, that system should be implemented quickly, for the Little Pest is rapidly coming of age.
Debbie Gump Associate Editor
WASHINGTON—Odd, conflcting noises are coming from the Ford campaign.
THE NEW FALL SEASON
Mary McGrory
Put them all together, and they spell amateur night.
One day, for instance, in the morning paper, we learn from unnamed White House sources that the right-wing threat from Ronald Reagan has been repelled.
By afternoon, however,
Howard (Bo) Callaway is
warning a group of Republican
congressmen that the President
could lose the first two
seats, New Hampshire and
Florida.
"THIS WAS A WAY of the President telling them it worked," said a White House tomes that locked conviction.
One explanation of the "threat-raped" story is that it was intended for those liberals in Congress who went to the White House last month to reprove the President for sounding too much like Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover.
Right gives Ford red light
The Callaway lament, on the other hand, was supposedly meant to alarm complacent Republicans who, if they were not aware of the papers, might have thought the President was home free.
Every campaign alternately crowns and poor-mouths, but generally with a little better coordination.
Besides, the President said at Helsinki, we are judged by our actions. His repeated trips to California suggest that he is scared to death of Reagan—more scared of him than of the bullets lately dodged in the Golden State,
THE CLAIMS OF suppressed resistance greatly please the Reaganites. The right wing is the touchest political entity on earth, and any suspicion that it is being taken for granted or written off sends it up the wall. This affront offers on Ronald Reagan, who takes the presidential raidals as a personal affront. They are an invaluable aid in goading him to the starting gate.
The Reagan operatives are working New Hampshire, site of the first primary, as if the vote was in favor of former Nixon aide and chief manager of the undecided candidacy, has made five trips. Jim Lake, who is second in age, has been there three times.
NOW THEY HAVE UNVEILED a list of public names, which they say, has surprising range.
"It itt just who they got," says one veteran Granite State politico. "It's who they've neutralized."
in a feat of diplomacy perhaps not seen since the opening to China, the Reagan agents managed to remove the
present, ultra-aftight governor,
Meldrim Thomson Jr., from the
position of official head
cheerleader for Reagan. They
coaxed him to step aside in
the office and gave him a
governor with a proud Yankee
name and a past as a
Rockefeller supporter.
had many problems in the recent special Senate election, but one of them surely was that he was regarded as the candidate. Loub Loeh, the nail-splitting editor of the Manchester Union Leader.
The Reagan operation, with its industry and professionalism, suggests the Reagan managers learned something from the Wyman debacle. Former Congressman Louis A. Wyman
The "kooks only" label has been peeled off the Reagan wagon train.
"We ran into little resistance on the party-spilling issue," says Jim Lake. "A lot of people told us they thought it would be
healthy for the President to have a good primary fight."
It could be "healthy." It could also be fatal for Ford. Invincible incumbents don't lose primaries. The Granite State has a history of cripping front-runners. There has been blood on the snow since 1932 in both parties.
New Hampshire is a state which demands house calls. Richard Nixon made them. Seas has basked Reagan for 15
days of hard campaigning between now and the last Tuesday in February, primary day.
But Gerald Ford keeps going west, to California, the site of the last primary in early June. The party's campaign will have to decide whether Ford is an invincible incumbent or an endangered candidate. If they really think he is north, they will point him north.
(c) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate Inc.
Kansas' problem
Prisons licked in past
Joe said he wasn't really a murderer.
"What would you have done," he intoned, "if you had come home from work and found your wife in bed with another guy?" I don't deny that I shot him, but I didn't want anything more than manlaudship. It wasn't first-degree murder."
Like more than 100 others at the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, Joe is serving a sentence that may last the rest of his life. His only hope he says, lies with his parole board.
"Because he is in California,
Sirhan Sirhan can have his first
bearing after just seven years.
They won't let me do that. I
can't see my first board for 15 years. That's how unfair the Kansas laws are.
"Do you know what this place can do to a man in 15 years? You lose all sense of your place in society. And if you don't know much about crime when you come in, you will know how to protect yourself when you leave. It's intensive instruction."
Bill was arrested last spring and charged with possession of burglary tools. He was jailed for 15 years to life. At Mountains
"CAN YOU IMAGINE it?" he began. "They've got me locked up but let murderers roam the streets in Kansas City."
Secret Service snafu
By PAULA JOLLY Contributing Writer
Actually there have been two
The latest incident, in which a car driven by a teenager rammed Ford's limousine in Hartford, was merely the frosting on the cake. Before that, there were two assassination attempts in which the Secret Service failed to watch suspicious people when With the Hartford incident it became clear that the Secret Service couldn't even protect the President from an ordinary automobile accident.
There has been a rash of speculation lately about the Secret Service's ability to protect the President. What definitely isn't secret about the people they bungled their job and uncomfortably large number of times.
recent motorcade incidents in which presidential right-of-way wasn't provided for. A few weeks before the Hartford incident, traffic coming onto a Chicago freeway during the rush hour wasn't halted so that the President's motorcade could pass, and Ford and his team stopped minutes until a path was cleared through the resulting traffic jam.
The Secret Service can share some of the blame for these incidents with the police departments of Chicago and Hartford. The police station stopped traffic coming onto the freeway. In Hartford, police only provided guards for intersections within two blocks of Ferd's door in two years before it was closed after the limousine had traveled three blocks. As a result, Ferd's car was running a
red light when struck by the other car.
While the Secret Service can share some of the blame with these police departments, the majority should nevertheless be borne by Secret Service people themselves. It is their job to make sure they are followed and they should have double-checked to ensure adequate police arrangements in both cases.
In Washington there are rumbles about an investigation into the Secret Services procedures. Maybe during the interim Ford should ask the Boy Scouts of America to provide crowd and traffic control. They would also need the job amabilisely during parades and other public events—why not during the President's travels? Maybe their presence would shame Secret Service people into doing the job for which they were hired!
He then glanced around to be sure that no former Kansas City murderers were in earshot.
"Those guys kill people," he continued. "I hadn't even done anything when I was caught." Some time later Bill revealed that his conviction was only one of five that he received about the same time, all for felonies. "I hope here, because I got
"I'm here because I got caught a few more times than the average guy," he said.
Dennis Ellsworth
Editor
"Then the judge said he couldn't give a five to 10. He said the state law required him to pay for the criminal habitual clause."
The stories of Joe and Bill are repeated many times over at Larsing. They are stories of people who failed to cope with society, and who, in their failures, committed crimes.
KILLING SHOULDN'T be something treated lightly, and habitual criminals are a plague on society. In these particular伎势, it might be found that Joe does not show signs of improvement. Yet, improvements surely can be made in our penal system, as the men suggest.
The system does, as Bill put it, keep most criminals "off the streets." It does effectively
confine convicted murderers and other assorted threats to society. But it should do more.
The Kansas penal system should be a flexible entity, something that will allow for the shades of punishment and confinement that justice requires. Though Joe and I have to admit, it is this broader point that should be understood.
WHY DOES KANSAJ require that people given life sentences must wait 15 years before they can see their first parole board?
Why and not the term set at 15 years and not seven? Or four?
And why does the stue place habitual small-time burglar in a violent criminal, as far as terms of incarceration are concerned? Why are habitual criminals given a mandatory sentence of its own to life, or be judged to the hood by the judge to decide otherwise?
The questions might pose severe problems for the penal system, or they might simply require an informative reply. Whatever the case, answers are needed as soon as possible.
If no harm is apparent in reviewing a man's parole request entail or in giving a parental warning to 18-to-life sentence to a habitual criminal, then why shouldn't these allowances be made?
Published at the University of Kansas weekly publication. Second-class postage paid by the university. Second-class payment periods. Second-class postage paid by the university for a semester or $18 in Douglass County and one $10 in Lincoln County. Subscription fee $1.25 per subscription. $1.25 per subscription. paid through the university.
Editor Business Manager
Dennis Ellsworth Cindy Long
To the 620.2 bright students at the University, we may 20,000 and more others take this opportunity to excuse our existence. We are most sorry you know that you appreciate and enjoy a motivating atmosphere. Many a time we have complained that sizes of classes were too big and that you were neither making me laugh nor the most out of your studies. So often we others have pointed out that you needed those more experienced
To the Editor:
Readers Respond / Apology made to the 620.7 bright ones
and sincere 7 teachers, since only they could satisfy the needs of bright students. Over and over we have insisted that the brightest the best. After all, 628.7 studentKU is quite a credit to KU.
But we others do serve a purpose. We came to KU so that the bright could have the best opportunities teachers would have some 20,000 leftovers from which to create a flourished high school. I came here just for that reason and flatter themselves into an
Oh, what would we do without the bright? How meaningless and unproductive life would be without bright people created by bright computerized ACT scores. Bright people, don't misunderstand us. We need you; oh, how we need you!
Lee D. Gerstenhaber
Assistant Instructor
Department of French
and Italian
Through other friends of the late Leo Beuermann, I have learned that a few people who knew him less well than we, or all, think that the small bronze bottle on the sidewalk at his favorite corner will not fully serve as a memorial to him. I think I can speak for all concerned with miming it in saying that this was a memorial to the story of Leo will be contained in Wilkins Museum; the modest
Plaque appropriate To the Editor:
proportions of the bronze relief with its inscription permit no such ambition.
A number of Pearson College students had befriended Leo in the last years of his life, sold the products of lonely hours in the nursing home, and thus enabled him to remain active as a part of the life he knew. He would live to almost lifelong deafness and general malformation, cut him off from it.
The students who had come to know him best thought that some tangible memorial to Leo
Lee didn't regard his business operations as degrading—the glorified in them. And those who can imagine what energy of body and spirit was expended in achieving this portion of the mission, he says, "In his serving daily at his spot, understand why the plaque is there, why the inscription, beneath the title "Distinguished
noun become—as he himself had been—a bar of Lawrence. The plaque at his special corner seemed a warm and fitting reminder of the tiny man who had sat there selling his pencils.
Citizen of Lawrence," consists of the simple quotation from one of Lee's letters to the students: "Remember me- I am that little man gone blind who used to sell pencils on the corner."
The existence of the plaque with such an inscription, beneath a relief of Leo in his cart, would cause even the complete stranger to wonder what a tribute that inspired by a man of rare qualities, no matter whether it piques his interest in finding out more about him, which wouldn't be difficult. Besides, Centron's
documentary, has acquainted people all over the country and beyond with his courage and increased their own.
The students of Pearson College have worked to defray the costs of their gift to the city. They have donated their time and skills to it. Thanks are due them for this loving marker and memorial, conceived with imagination and the beerman's extraordinary life.
Anna Francis Bloch Member of the Pearson Memorial Committee