Cold War Meme Made New ... Universities Hotbeds For Un-American Activities?

FBI Fears American Universities 'Swarming with Spies' ... Foreign spies have become much more common in America's higher education institutions over the last five years, reports Bloomberg. The FBI says many of them are Chinese nationals. The end of the Cold War did a lot to deepen international scientific collaboration, prompting universities to broaden their global activities. Students on American soil have become even more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. But this openness also exposed the vulnerability of academic institutions to scientific and industrial espionage, as well as to the theft of advanced technologies, US national security officials believe. "We have intelligence and cases indicating that US universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services," Frank Figliuzzi, Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence, told Bloomberg. – Bloomberg

Dominant Social Theme: The enemy has penetrated American universities and must be repulsed. The FBI will need a bigger budget.

Free-Market Analysis: The FBI has discovered that American Universities are swarming with spies. This is ironic because US Intel agencies generally have been responsible for generating false-flag "war on terror" operations that have been criticized by the US legal community.

There are difficulties, in fact, with many "war on terror" operations in particular, with charges of entrapment surrounding more than a few of these episodes. It can surely be speculated – and has been – that terrorist hysteria is being whipped up to justify US Intel generally and to expand budgets.

This sort of thing, unfortunately, is part of a larger history that goes back at least to the 1950s in the US and the so-called communist scare that the FBI in particular was involved in hyping.

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