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LOCAL POLICE CREATING AN AMERICAN STASI
Phil Leggiere, Don't Tase Me Bro - When the infamous Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information Prevention System) program, which would have "empowered" US workers with access to private citizen's homes with de facto spy powers to report on suspicious activities, was floated by the Bush White House in 2002, the program was thwarted, thanks to a broad (at the time nearly unprecedented) civil libertarian coalition uniting left and right.
Operation TIPS itself was killed by the US Congress, which prohibited the program explicitly in the Homeland Security Act, passed in November 2002.
Its spirit, however, is alive and well, reincarnated in programs like iWATCH, an initiative developed by Los Angeles Police chief William Bratton, designed to enlist citizens to actively look for signs of potentially suspicious behavior and report it to police.
While Bratton and the 63 police departments in the US and Canada which have endorsed the program present it as a 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch, critics claim that, in addition to creeping out America with positively Orwellian promotional videos, iWATCH will encourage a Stasi like network of anonymous snitching.
In the words of the Los Angeles ACLU, iWATCH "actively encourages people to report a variety of ordinary activities--such as people who are wearing clothes that are too big, or who are drawing buildings, or who are doing something else that could be innocuous. That leads toward racial and religious profiling."
LAist reports that, according to the ACLU, "People will report ordinary behavior of people who fit a preconceived notion of what suspicious people look like. And what does that mean for the so-called suspicious person? "[They] could be visited by police and have personal data sent to government databases, where it could be used indefinitely to subject them to extensive searches at airports, deny them government
Operation TIPS itself was killed by the US Congress, which prohibited the program explicitly in the Homeland Security Act, passed in November 2002.
Its spirit, however, is alive and well, reincarnated in programs like iWATCH, an initiative developed by Los Angeles Police chief William Bratton, designed to enlist citizens to actively look for signs of potentially suspicious behavior and report it to police.
While Bratton and the 63 police departments in the US and Canada which have endorsed the program present it as a 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch, critics claim that, in addition to creeping out America with positively Orwellian promotional videos, iWATCH will encourage a Stasi like network of anonymous snitching.
In the words of the Los Angeles ACLU, iWATCH "actively encourages people to report a variety of ordinary activities--such as people who are wearing clothes that are too big, or who are drawing buildings, or who are doing something else that could be innocuous. That leads toward racial and religious profiling."
LAist reports that, according to the ACLU, "People will report ordinary behavior of people who fit a preconceived notion of what suspicious people look like. And what does that mean for the so-called suspicious person? "[They] could be visited by police and have personal data sent to government databases, where it could be used indefinitely to subject them to extensive searches at airports, deny them government
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