{"id":794,"date":"2002-12-04T11:08:12","date_gmt":"2002-12-04T19:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/12\/04\/ya-win-some-ya-lose-some\/"},"modified":"2019-12-02T14:49:51","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T22:49:51","slug":"ya-win-some-ya-lose-some","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2002\/12\/04\/ya-win-some-ya-lose-some\/","title":{"rendered":"Ya win some, ya lose some"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>), but if you’ve been checking in on me for a bit, you may remember my being up in arms about Operation TIPS<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Well, according to Wired news today<\/a>, one of the upsides to the recently passed ‘Homeland Security Act’ was the nixing of the TIPS program.<\/p>\n

\n 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.<\/p>\n

Caught in a hail of criticism, the Justice Department decided not to engage mail or utility workers in the program. Officials then toned down<\/a> the TIPS website, deleting references to the one million snoops and excising the exhortation to “Volunteer now!”<\/p>\n

In July, House Majority Leader Dick Armey<\/a> (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).<\/p>\n

“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.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kudos to Mr. Armey for standing up for the freedoms of his constituents \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

On the “lose some” side of the equation, however, we’ve still got the Homeland Security Act<\/a> itself to cope with, full of goodies like provisions allowing ISPs to turn over customer’s e-mail records without a warrant<\/a>, and of course, Mr. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness System<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wheeeeeee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2042],"tags":[14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}