Thoughtcrimes Now in Vogue at Air Force?

Here's a strange and disturbing story out of the Air Force Academy. It seems that in an effort to police what it believes are incidents of bullying, disinformation, or extremist commentary the AF leadership has set up a social media monitoring mechanism that reviews the personal, off-duty activities of cadets in places like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X and the like. 

Now, military members have significantly fewer protections under the Constitution than civilians. This has been clear since the founding of the Republic. Service members are prohibited by law from openly criticizing certain elected officials, for example. But airmen, soldiers and sailors don't forfeit all of their constitutional rights, and the open-ended nature of this monitoring program sounds a clear signal that Academy officials are not interested in just correcting incidents of illegality that might be revealed on social media. Those officials are interested in discovering people who have improper thoughts about, well, who knows? The originator and overseer of the project is quoted as saying, "The goal of monitoring social media is to educate cadets, prevent them from spreading harmful material online and respond when someone is posting content that academy leaders consider harmful to the base’s culture."  

Well. Nothing overreaching or potentially problematic about that. The Air Force cadet squadrons already contain what most of us familiar with the program refer to as political officers- cadets who have been stewed in the military's version of  DEI - to report their wrong-thinking peers for reeduca-, uh, counseling when they express opinions inconsistent with DEI theology. It's not much of an intellectual leap to see how monitoring off-duty and private social communications can greatly assist in ferreting out wrongthink.  

As you can see from the article, several constitutional and privacy law specialists who are real lawyers are raising 4th Amendment questions about this program. My hope is that the monitoring system gets cut before it provides Academy officials with information that their DEI programs aren't being taken seriously by the cadets. If that happens, the program will expand dramatically unless it's curtailed by legal challenge.