Posted on 07/15/2002 9:05:15 AM PDT by eshu
By Ritt Goldstein
July 15 2002
The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.
The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity".
Civil liberties groups have already warned that, with the passage earlier this year of the Patriot Act, there is potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens.
As with the Patriot Act, TIPS is being pursued as part of the so-called war against terrorism. It is a Department of Justice project.
Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.
A pilot program, described on the government Web site www.citizencorps.gov, is scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants participating in the first stage. Assuming the program is initiated in the 10 largest US cities, that will be 1 million informants for a total population of almost 24 million, or one in 24 people.
Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states. According to a 1992 report by Harvard University's Project on Justice, the accuracy of informant reports is problematic, with some informants having embellished the truth, and others suspected of having fabricated their reports.
Present Justice Department procedures mean that informant reports will enter databases for future reference and/or action. The information will then be broadly available within the department, related agencies and local police forces. The targeted individual will remain unaware of the existence of the report and of its contents.
The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted.
At state and local levels the TIPS program will be co-ordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which
was given sweeping new powers, including internment, as part of the Reagan Administration's national security initiatives. Many key figures of the Reagan era are part of the Bush Administration.
The creation of a US "shadow government", operating in secret, was another Reagan national security initiative.
Ritt Goldstein is an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability. He has lived in Sweden since 1997, seeking political asylum there, saying he was the victim of life-threatening assaults in retaliation for his accountability efforts. His application has been supported by the European Parliament, five of Sweden's seven big political parties, clergy, and Amnesty and other rights groups.
It makes perfect sense that a paranoid would write a paranoid article.
Leave it to the SMH to give this nut a forum. But so many are willing to believe his spin.
Come to think of it, he's probably got a good gig going on in Sweden.
The 400 intricate pages of the patriot act were not written in the few days after 911 before it was passed and became law. It was sitting on someone's desk waiting for the appropriate shock that would let it be passed.
Who said (paraphrased), "This country would be a lot easier to govern if it was a dictatorship. As long as I was the dictator"? Huey Long? Nope.
It was President George W. Bush.
Where exactly did you get that??
Bush said it. Heard it with my own ears. Although it was said very much in jest.
(Still there is that "truth in jest" thing.)
Yeah, I know it's "real." So what? I read it. Sounds like a centralized 911 telephone system. Or calling up America's Most Wanted. Nothing I read about it scares me at all.
Seems to be a peeling away of levels of bureaucracy and training people to recognize potential terrorism. But so many want to believe it something else because a lunatic gave such an opinion about it.
And yes, I do know oppression can come in different guises. I don't see it here. The greatest recent invasion of rights came with the Bush/Demo/Repub rules on effectively abolishing medical and financial privacy, if the person who wants the info is a large corporation.
- Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarschall, Nuremberg Trials
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