[Nettime-bold] Stalin's Victory

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

We live in the illusion of winning the cold war. In fact, the Soviets 
won... This ads to the recently reported story "The New York Five" 
about five people with no criminal records wrongly arrested under 
the Patriot Act, and to the story of couple of Israeli citizens 
deported because they were standing on Brooklyn bridge (well, 
they do look like Arabs, don't they?). Can you imagine how many 
cases like this it will be now that 1 in 24 Americans is called upon 
to be a snitch? Have fun - volunteer! I just did. The more informants 
there is - the more chaos there will be (I am talking here from rather 
personal experience of former Yugoslavia). In the end everybody 
informed on everybody else, and there was not enough staff to 
parse through all the information and sift out the relevant stuff. The 
rest is history. Sometimes it looks as if Bush and Bin Laden work 
as well coordinated as did Tudjman and Milosevic during their war.
ivo
ps - interestingly it is reported by yet another American citizen 
seeking political asylum in Europe...

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0714-06.htm

Published on Monday, July 15, 2002 in the Sydney Morning Herald
US Planning to Recruit One in 24 Americans as Citizen Spies
by Ritt Goldstein

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 
[http://www.citizencorps.gov/tips.html], 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


______________________________________________________
No immunity from prosecutions for war crimes or terrorism!!!
U.S. government & military officials & corporate executives
must be subject to the same laws as the rest of the world!
Shebar Windstone <shebar@inch.com>
CHMOD http://www.inch.com/~shebar/
At-Home with Joan Nestle http://www.JoanNestle.com/
GLOW Tibet Archives http://www.tibet.org/glow/
Chushi Gangdruk http://www.chushigangdruk.org/
TibetanIssues.org http://www.tibetanissues.org/
(Un)Covering Tibet: Journalists & activists discuss news/media
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/roundtables/tibet_intro.shtml
______________________________________________________

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