FW: we're on our way...

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Published on Wednesday, May 14, 2003 by the Boston Globe
>
> Building a Nation of Snoops
>
> by Carl Takei
>
>
>
> ''WATCHING AMERICA with Pride, not Prejudice.'' This is the Orwellian
> motto of the New Jersey-based Community Anti-Terrorism Training
> Institute, or CAT Eyes, an antiterrorist citizen informant program
> being adopted by local police departments throughout the East Coast
> and parts of the Midwest. Mike Licata, a high school teacher and
> retired Air Force officer, created the CAT Eyes program in cooperation
> with ex-military SWAT officer Jason McClendon and businessman Tony
> Elghossain.
>
> In a recent telephone interview, Licata said he wants to use CAT Eyes
> to create what he calls ''a modern civil defense network,'' converting
> neighborhood watch groups into antiterrorist informant cells. These
> groups, constantly watching for signs of terrorist activity in their
> neighborhoods and workplaces, would report suspicious activities
> directly to the FBI. Said Licata: ''I envision 100 million Americans
> looking for indicators of terrorism and promptly reporting it to a
> central database where it would get analyzed.''
>
> According to Licata, city and town police departments in New Jersey,
> Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio have adopted the program, as
> well as the Washington, D.C., Park Police, and scattered cities in
> Florida, Nevada, and California. University police departments,
> including at MIT, are also adopting the program.
>
> Licata singles out the Boston police for praise, noting that they have
> assigned 20 community service officers to conduct citizen trainings.
> He will, no doubt, use his increasing local successes to leverage bids
> for state and federal funds. Licata says he is trying to develop a
> statewide program with the Virginia governor's office and is currently
> drafting funding proposals to the Department of Justice and to
> President Bush's CitizenCorps program.
>
> Licata has few qualms about the prospect of CAT Eyes-trained citizens
> spying on their neighbors. ''If I felt that my neighbor of 10 years
> was doing fund-raising for a group, I'd turn 'em in,'' says Licata.
> After all, he says, the FBI will ''just investigate them -- and if
> you're wrong, you're wrong. And if you're right, that's a big thing!''
>
> Licata does emphasize that racial profiling is wrong, and his training
> materials disavow racism. Terrorism, he says, ''has nothing to do with
> race or religion. Timothy McVeigh was an Irish-American and he blew up
> the federal building in Oklahoma.''
>
> However, such assurances give cold comfort. Citizen informers, after
> all, are not subject to the same public accountability as police
> officers. If a citizen informer unfairly targets certain races or
> ethnic groups, there is no way to keep track of it and no way to
> punish the errant informer. Licata himself admits, ''If someone goes
> the wrong way, there's nothing I can do about that.''
>
> Moreover, with or without racial profiling, CAT Eyes could severely
> curtail our expectations of privacy. If Licata comes even close to his
> stated goal of 100 million informers, CAT Eyes would dwarf the citizen
> informer programs of the most repressive totalitarian states, making
> them appear amateurish by comparison.
>
> Even communist East Germany, a tightly controlled society with more
> informants per capita than either Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany,
> was not as ambitious about citizen surveillance as CAT Eyes. In its
> heyday, the East German secret police, or Stasi, is generally believed
> to have had about 2 million informers, or about one-eighth of the East
> German population.
>
> CAT Eyes wants to train more than one in three Americans to be FBI
> informers. As the number of such informers rises, participants in even
> the smallest of dinner parties and water cooler gossip sessions could
> reasonably fear that expressing controversial opinions or admitting to
> ''suspicious'' associations would attract the attention of the FBI.
>
> This comes at a time when cherished American rights to privacy are
> already under assault. Last year the FBI obtained warrants for 1,228
> secret antiterrorism searches and wiretaps, a 30 percent increase over
> 2001. In April, the CIA requested congressional authority to conduct
> its own searches and wiretaps of US residents independent of the FBI.
> (Though congressional Democrats successfully scuttled the proposal
> this time around, it is likely to resurface soon.) Meanwhile, Justice
> Department lawyers are quietly drafting proposals to further expand
> the FBI's authority to use secret wiretaps and conduct searches with
> little or no judicial oversight.
>
> A country that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors is a not just
> a sick society but a weak one. Cooperation and solidarity will never
> flourish in an America suffused by the paranoia and mutual suspicion
> inevitably generated by an informer culture -- yet those are exactly
> the assets we need if we are to confront the terrorist threat with our
> national values intact.
>
> Carl Takei is a paralegal with a Boston law firm and a civil liberties
> activist.
>
> (c) Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.