Citizen Spies and the New Normal

Here is a blast from the past.

From the 2002 article:

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…

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.

One in 24 people was the start point for the pilot program. Not 1 in 24 Military aged males, mind you, but 1 in 24 men women and children. More informers than the Stasi had. Once recruited, give each informant a radio and a car, and you have a crude vehicle surveillance unit as well, with it’s own pre-backstopped identity.

Bear in mind, this was one month from implementation. It had already been approved, funded, planned, assigned, put on the books, and recruitment had begun. If you think they killed it due to a media report when it had gone that far, think again – that is not how these agencies work. I’d bet my life this is out there right now. When it was to begin, the plan called for 1 in 24 citizen informants in the pilot program. If it got off the ground behind the scenes back then, we are over a decade later now. How many more informants might they have today under a fully operational program?

If you live near any major city, and your town has say, 10,000 residents, the government may have a roving mob of 400-500 citizen informants, roaming around spying on whatever some unnamed bureaucrat arbitrarily tells them to spy on. They would be your neighbors, the guy at your Karate class, the geek at the gym, your co-worker, even the taxi driver who takes you home from the bar. No court orders, no warrants, no official sanction necessary. All deployable at some bureaucrat’s whim.

Order cable TV or get your refrigerator repaired, and if you are on the list all they have to do is assign their informant, and he will file a report on everything he sees in your house. He could even come in with a hidden body camera and microphone to film the interior of your house, dig through your medicine cabinet when he goes to the bathroom, plant a transmitter/listening device in your cable box, and dig through your private stuff if the opportunity arises, all to get extra points with his handler. Since he isn’t Law Enforcement, he doesn’t worry about things like warrants or probable cause, and you can bet his handler would encourage his illegal intrusiveness with a wink and a nod.

If you are active in anyway in politics, be it left or right, I think you have to assume strangers will at some point begin getting into your business, if they haven’t already. If they are so brazen as to label veterans who fought for their nation terrorist threats, structure their wargames around the idea of Tea Party members needing to be killed, run a second fiber optic line into a CBS reporter’s house to plant classified documents on her computer, and create a network of citizen informants larger than the Stasi’s, anything is possible.

How far we’ve come.

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9 years ago

[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]

Aeoli Pera
Aeoli Pera
9 years ago

How many people can be employed spying on the activities of a single productive person? The answer is that it doesn’t matter, because economy was never the point. The organs of the state always earn their pay, and the organs of the state never make mistakes.

Unknown
Unknown
9 years ago

No doubt they would be out looking for racists.

freedom
freedom
9 years ago

I received mandatory TIPS training. They may have targeted me and my fellow employees but I don’t think anyone was hit. I did learn that any suspicions I had were wrong if they were based on someone’s race, religion, or culture. We were basically told to ignore everyone but male whitey.