Since 9/11, spying in the name of homeland security has become as American as baseball, cherry pie and listening to a Cat Stevens record. According to a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle, a relatively unknown branch of the Defense Department called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is employing its state-of-the-art aerial imaging equipment in service of homeland security. Closer to home, David Horowitz and the Independent Women's Forum are scanning the nation's college campuses in the name of homeland security.

Horowitz, the head of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and the conservative women at the Washington, DC-based Independent Women's Forum are focusing their homeland security spying on a much more specific target, liberal academics. Together Horowitz and the IWF have been cranking out advertisements and placing them in a number of student newspapers across the country encouraging conservative students to scan their campuses for so-called anti-American academics.

According to Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!, the advertisements running in student newspapers charge universities with being dominated by liberal or left-wing professors. The ads "are paid for by well-funded groups like Students for Academic Freedom -- a Horowitz group -- and the Independent Women's Forum," Democracy Now! reported.

Two of the campaign's first victims are Ball State's Professor Alves and David Gibbs, an Associate professor of History and Sociology at the University of Arizona, who last spring taught a course entitled "What is Politics?"

On the Ball State University campus, posters "announcing that history professor Abel Alves was 'WANTED'" was put up by Amanda Carpenter, a senior, who said she put up the posters in order to attract attention to her website, the Muncie, Indiana Star Press reported. The professor's "alleged offenses include indoctrinating freshmen with liberal books, such as Fast Food Nation, and guest lectures by the Humane Society."

According to the newspaper, another Professor, George Wolfe, who teaches peace and conflict resolution, was recently the target of a profile in Horowitz's online publication, FrontPage Magazine. The story "accused Wolfe of giving students extra credit for going to Washington to protest the war in Iraq and lowering the grade of a student who argued in favor of a military response to the Sept. 11 attacks." The university denied that any credit had been given for merely attending an anti-war demonstration.

On September 27, David Gibbs told Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! that his largely freshmen class "focuses on propaganda and deception," and he "emphasize[s] incidents of the government lying and things like that." When he taught the class last spring, "the Independent Women's Forum... put into the local student newspaper, an advertisement that basically argued that there's a kind of left wing domination of the universities and students should fight that with the strong implication they should monitor their professors and report them, at least that's how I read it."

When Gibbs received student evaluations, "a student who said I'm anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking that America sucks," said that "I should be investigated by the FBI, and the FBI has been contacted."

Later on, "another student on a web log during the summer said he took my class and also said that he didn't like my politics and suggests that students shouldn't take my class but should drop by and try to disrupt it. There have been a number of instances like that which I hadn't had before."

Although Gibbs said that he wasn't sure or worried about whether the FBI was contacted, he acknowledged that he thought it was "indicative of a larger national trend, which is conservative activist groups with lots of money and connections to the Republican Party trying to encourage and even to some extent orchestrate students and local conservative groups like those at the University of Arizona to go and basically harass faculty if they don't like their politics."

Goodman pointed out that the full-page ads, similar to ones placed in other college student newspapers, says: "Top ten things your professors do to skew you. They push their political views, liberal opinions dominate, they don't present both sides of the debate, conservative viewpoints practically non-existent. Classrooms are for learning, not brainwashing. They force you to check your intellectual honesty at the door. They make you uncomfortable if you disagree. Grading should be based on facts not opinion. Education? More like indoctrination."

Independent women?

Founded in 1992, as a direct response to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Independent Women's Forum Mission Statement aims "to affirm women's participation in and contributions to a free, self-governing society."