I don’t have the posts available at the moment to reference (I’m still in the process of resurrecting all my posts from April through August of this year after my webserver crashed), but if you’ve been checking in on me for a bit, you may remember my being up in arms about Operation TIPS. In essence, this was a to be a government-sponsored system for US citizens to snitch on each other, calling on postal workers, utility workers, and anyone who volunteered to “turn in” people they suspected of “suspicious activity”. Ick.
Well, according to Wired news today, one of the upsides to the recently passed ‘Homeland Security Act’ was the nixing of the TIPS program.
A controversial government initiative to recruit Americans to spy on each other in an attempt to prevent terrorist attacks was quietly killed with the passage of the Homeland Security Act.
Caught in a hail of criticism, the Justice Department decided not to engage mail or utility workers in the program. Officials then toned down the TIPS website, deleting references to the one million snoops and excising the exhortation to “Volunteer now!”
In July, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), introduced legislation to ban TIPS (Sec. 880). The bill also prevented the Justice Department from using the Homeland Security Act as a launch pad to create a National ID system (Sec. 1514), and to create a Privacy Officer (Sec. 222).
“Mr. Armey was adamant about keeping those provisions in the bill,” said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Armey, who recently retired after 18 years in Congress. “He felt the programs were not consistent with free society.”
Kudos to Mr. Armey for standing up for the freedoms of his constituents — I have to wonder of that was doubly galling for Pres. Bush, as Mr. Armey was representing Bush’s home state! A pity he recently retired, but at least he got some good work in before he stepped down.
On the “lose some” side of the equation, however, we’ve still got the Homeland Security Act itself to cope with, full of goodies like provisions allowing ISPs to turn over customer’s e-mail records without a warrant, and of course, Mr. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness System.
Wheeeeeee.