Boston Globe/Libertythink
Building a Nation of Snoops
Sat May 17 02:28:08 2003
66.93.216.131

Building a Nation of Snoops

by Carl Takei, the Boston Globe

"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.''

...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.

...Licata himself admits, ''If someone goes the wrong way, there's nothing I can do about that.''

Homeland Security summer camp for teens

Nazi Germany - the road to dictatorship
Germany became a nation of snoops. People were employed in each street, in each building complex etc. with the sole purpose of keeping an eye on others in their 'area' and reporting them to the authorities if they believed that something was amiss. The reputation of the Nazi police and the secret police lead by Himmler was such that no-one wished to cause offence. People kept their thoughts to themselves unless they wished to invite trouble. In this sense, Nazi Germany was a nation run on fear of the government. Hitler had created a one party state within months of being appointed chancellor.
Nothing to see here folks, move along. That was the last war against terrorism.

Remember what we learned today: "The Nazi concept, if you will, is still very real, and I think anything we do to give that particular thinking a venue, a format, is a mistake."


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