Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap is one of three panelists who will discuss terrorism, homeland security and civil liberties in a Bates College presentation at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Part of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Civic Forum series Maine in a Transnational World, the event is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6400.

The other panelists are Shenna Bellows, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, and Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston field office.

Dunlap became Maine’s secretary of state in 2005. He has been a vigorous promoter of technological improvements in the delivery of government services. As Maine’s chief motor vehicle official, he was nominated to a national committee, created under the Intelligence Reform Act, to set standards for state driver’s licenses and identification cards. With passage of the Real ID Act, Dunlap has been an active participant in the national discussion of identity security.

Dunlap’s career in public service began with his election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1996. During eight years in the Legislature, he served three terms as House Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

Dunlap’s’ notable legislative activities included securing passage of the Great Ponds Act, protections for permanently disabled workers under the State Retirement System, creation and development of the Lifetime Hunting and Fishing License and the creation of the Office of Program Evaluation and Governmental Accountability.

Bellows has served as the executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union since March 2005. She returned home to Maine, where she grew up, after spending two years as a national field organizer at the ACLU Legislative Office in Washington, D.C. In Washington, Shenna was a leader in post-9/11 issues, developing a field program around the Patriot Act, as well as working to defeat several constitutional amendments that would have undermined the criminal justice system, freedom of speech and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.

She is active in the Maine Immigrants Rights Coalition, the Women’s Leadership Action Coalition and the Maine Choice Coalition.

A 22-year veteran of the FBI, Bamford took charge of the Boston field office in 2007. He previously headed the counterterrorism division of the bureau’s Los Angeles office.

After six years as a Marine Corps officer, he joined the FBI in 1986 and has worked in Washington, New Haven and Baltimore. He was a sniper on the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, leader of a SWAT unit in New Haven and was second in command of the FBI’s national Critical Incident Response Group.

While working on the Hostage Rescue Team, Bamford was deployed to three high-profile operations: the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho in 1992, the Branch Davidian siege in Texas in 1993 and the Talladega prison riot in Alabama in 1995.

Powers will discuss his drug war experiences in the FBI, scrutinizing how the agency focuses on street level drug dealers — who he says are disproportionately poor people and people of color — while doing little to prevent the entrance of drugs into urban communities. Powers will also examine the FBI’s continuation of their COINTELPRO operation, a division that has focused specifically on infiltrating and destroying organizations such as the Black Panther Party.

The conference, aside from examining the inequalities of the criminal justice system, will also explore how this disparity feeds a profitable, fast growing, privatized prison industry and concludes by highlighting youth activism and education as tools to break the cycle of incarceration.

Other sessions, all held in Chase Hall Lounge on Campus Avenue, are:

2:30 p.m. Education Not Incarceration. Members of the Friends of Island Academy, a New York City-based youth development and GED program for recently released youth offenders, discuss their work in assisting their clients to make the transition from prison to community. Staff from the Lewiston Day Reporting Center, a community-based social service agency for juvenile offenders, talk about the support work done locally. Bates senior Ben Griesenger of Cambridge, Mass., discusses his experience with Day Reporting and building further connections between Bates and the community.

4:30 p.m. Prisons and Youth Organizing. Organizers from The NIA (“purpose” in Swahili) Project share their experiences in creating support programs for “at-risk” youth in Boston.

The conference, organized by the New World Coalition, is funded in part by an Arthur Crafts Service-Learning grant administered by Bates College Center for Service-Learning. Other student organizations, including Amandla!, the Jewish Cultural Community, Solidaridad Latina and Women of Color, have also provided funding. For more information, call 207-786-8272.

Sponsored by Maine Citizens to Defend the Bill of Rights, the conference will take place March 23 and 31 in Chase Hall Lounge at Bates College. The talks are open to the public at no charge.

Speaking at 1 p.m. March 23 will be Ed Tatro, who will present a four-hour lecture in which he will link the FBI to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Tatro was a consultant to director Oliver Stone during the filming of the motion picture “JFK.”

At 7 p.m. March 23, former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen will discuss his 25 years with the bureau and his involvement with alleged illegal break-ins and violence against the Black Panthers organization.

Lecturing at 1 p.m. March 31 will be former undercover agent Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. He will speak on alleged FBI complicity in the deaths of Florida civil-rights activists Henry and Harriet Moore.

More information on the conference is available from organizer Joseph Baltar at 207-293-3479.