US recruiting 1 in 24 citizens as spies

[forteanajones]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/14/1026185141232.html

US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies
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 (http://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.

[ January 16, 2004, 03:06 PM: Message edited by: forteanajones ]

[dragonfly]

The Washington Post
November 24, 2002

Proposal to Enlist Citizen Spies Was Doomed From Start

BYLINE: Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Justice Department's Operation TIPS program, which would have enlisted tens of thousands of truckers, bus drivers and other workers as citizen spies, was doomed before it began.

The Homeland Security package approved by the Senate last week and slated to be signed by President Bush includes language explicitly prohibiting the government from implementing the controversial initiative. It was hounded by criticism from civil libertarians and targeted for elimination by key lawmakers.

The ill-fated program was first announced by Bush in March as part of a package of "Citizen Corps" initiatives aimed at getting regular Americans involved in fighting terrorism.

But as details about the program began to leak out, parties as divergent as the American Civil Liberties Union and House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) rallied to condemn the effort. They argued it would encourage citizens to snoop on one another while doing little to safeguard the nation.

The initiative quickly became a public-relations disaster for Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other Bush administration officials. It served as a symbol for anti-terrorism policies that many Democrats and civil liberties groups considered heavy-handed.

"This program epitomized the government's insatiable appetite for surveillance of law-abiding citizens," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington office. "Too many people thought that the government's anti-terrorism policies wouldn't have an impact on their lives, but this showed that they would."

TIPS -- the Terrorism Information and Prevention System -- was envisioned as a "national system for reporting suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity" involving "millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places," according to a description posted last summer on the Justice Department's Web site.

The ACLU and other groups, alarmed by the possibility that utility workers or delivery drivers might be enlisted to spy on customers, said the program was akin to creating "government-sanctioned Peeping Toms." Armey, a soon-to-be-retired conservative lawmaker with a decidedly libertarian bent, inserted language into the original Homeland Security bill slating the program for elimination, while Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) proposed cutting the initiative's funding.

Justice officials attempted to rescue the effort by issuing rules in August explicitly excluding any mail carriers, utility repair personnel or other workers with access to private homes. Ashcroft also told lawmakers he had scrapped plans for a centralized database to compile suspicious reports.

But the retreat did little to calm lawmakers' fears, leading to language in the final version of the Homeland Security package prohibiting "any and all activities" to implement the program.

Glenda Kendrick, a spokeswoman with the Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs, said last week that Operation TIPS "was never operational, so there's nothing to shut down."

"It never made it past the proposal stage," she said.