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news report
 Monday July 15, 2002 13:29 by Wu Ming
 US Planning to Recruit One in 24 Americans as Citizen Spies This is the worst thing I have read in a long time - didn't they used to warn us about godless commies by telling us as kids about this type of shit. This is the worst thing I have read in a long time - didn't they used to warn us about godless commies by telling us as kids about this type of shit. US Planning to Recruit One in 24 Americans as Citizen Spies. 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. Copyright © 2002. The Sydney Morning Herald
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Comments (3 of 3)
Jump To Comment: 3 2 1It's becoming clear that the U.S. is in the midst of a fascist coup. We must oppose this, first off, by not financing their fascism. Don't patronize McDonalds or any other major U.S. multinational operating in Ireland! Many, if not most, of the shareholders of U.S. corporations make political contributions, pay taxes and otherwise aid these kind of schemes and the U.S. war machine. Fascism in the U.S. is a threat to the world. We must begin resisting now-don't patronize their companies!
In WWII, the world boycotted companies based in Nazi Germany, we must now do the same with the U.S., the signs are becoming too clear and we can't afford to wait any longer!
This should not surprise anyone. The slowly evolving fascist polity in the U$ now adds mass spying to its arsenal of repression. The United $tates has been the world's leading prison-state per capita for the last 25 years, with a brief exception during Boris Yeltsin's declaration of a state of emergency.
That means that while Reagan was talking about a Soviet "evil empire" he was the head of a state that imprisoned more people per capita. In supposedly "hard line" Bulgaria of the Soviet Bloc of the 1980s, the imprisonment rate was less than half that of the United States.
To find a comparsion with the U$ imprisonment of Black people, there is no statistic that compares including Apartheid South Africa of the era before Mandela was president.
The last situation remotely comparable to the situation today was Stalin during war time. The majority of prisoners are non-violent offenders, and the U$ government now holds about half a million more prisoners than China; even though China is four times the population of the United $tates.
Along with mass imprisonment, we can now add government spies as the hallmarks of a "free country."
Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities that will be selected.
Operation TIPS, involving 1 million workers in the pilot stage, will be a national reporting system that allows these workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free reporting number is readily available.
Everywhere in America, a concerned worker can call a toll-free number and be connected directly to a hotline routing calls to the proper law enforcement agency or other responder organizations when appropriate.
Operation TIPS is coming in August 2002.
http://www.citizencorps.gov/tips.html