Which Ken is this? Odd that he should be paranoid about the kind of activity which by its very nature is known to anyone who wants to know of it: in fact, its success (or its very existence) is constituted by how many know about it.
I suppose he is merely trying to be funny, but if he is serious, it's a bit creepy: as though he has decided that the only recourse left is illegal secret activity, though I can't for the life of me imagine what that could be at the present time.
Jenny, Yoshie, Justin, Kelley, probably others I can't remember just now have all referred to their local activity on list.
We have a much larger "core" of people (mostly new to movement activity) here in Bloomington/Normal than we ever had during the Vietnam War; and there is independent activity at both universities and the junior college. Moreover, some people on their own (I think including a student group at the junior college) came out of the blue to announce a campaign to have the two local city councils declare non-cooperation with the Patriot Act. I went to their first meeting: wonderful to see that many pretty complete amateurs really plunging in. And it turns out that the Bloomington Human Relations Council had already made plans to hold a more-or-less formal hearing on the act in January, and the Chair of the Council was at the meeting suggesting how this new group could help the Council. Fantastic.
(When we started campaigning for the creation of that Council back in 1965 people went berserk. As part of the campaign we put a Black Santa Claus in the 1965 Christmas Parade. They had half the police force there just to keep them out. So he followed the parade on foot about a half block behind leading my 10 year old daughter by the hand. They printed a photo of Merlin Kennedy, the Santa, and my daughter, in Jet. It took us about two years of constant hassling to get the City Council to create the HRC. Now that Council is de facto part of the anti-war movement!!!!!)
I would really like to know if so much independent activity (i.e., varying local groups, on and off campus) is springing up elsewhere. We need a sense of how people in different communities are doing. What else is a left maillist for?
Incidentally -- even from the paranoid viewpoint Ken expresses, at least under present conditions, the more open activity is the safer it is. Do secret stuff now, & you may have your finger in the pencil sharpener.
Carrol