Watching Over Ourselves

Why is this administration so intent on inducing citizens to spy on one another? First came operation TIPS (the Terrorist Information and Prevention System) in 2002, which was supposed to recruit transportation workers, mailmen, utility crews and the like to spy on their neighbors. The program was eventually killed in Congress, due to public outcry. Next was the Total Information Awareness program, which constituted one of the truly bizarre heights of the war on terror. TIA, which was led by the convicted felon John Poindexter, was supposed to develop mass surveillance and other technologies to gather as much personal information about as many people as possible. (see the truly crazy original seal of the program). Unsurprisingly, that program too was defunded by Congress in 2003.

Now the administration is at it again, with this program enlisting school bus drivers to spy on their passengers, supposedly on the lookout for terrorists. According to the New York Times,

“School bus drivers around the country are being trained to watch for potential terrorists, in a program financed by the Homeland Security Department. Designers of the program, called School Bus Watch, want to turn 600,000 drivers into an army of observers.

‘The terrorist is not going to be able to do some of their casing and rehearsal activity without being detected by one of you,’ Mr. Beatty, a former antiterrorism officer, told the drivers in his class. The more people watching, he said, the safer the community would be.”

Its sheer outlandishness and ostentatious invitation for abuse may very well destine “School Bus Watch” to a similar fate as TIPS and TIA. Congress has not really been eager to pass such openly fascistic programs, at least not those uniformly affecting the citizenry as a whole. However, we should not celebrate so quickly if Congress refuses to back Bush’s bus driver surveillance. As Alexander Cockburn pointed out in 2002, to a large extent, even TIA represented bureaucracy catching up with reality: before the passage of TIA, and after its abolition, “Police reports, criminal records, mortgage records, credit history, medical history, former employment, DMV data--either lawfully or with artifice, any competent private investigator can get the skinny on you. Wiretaps? My local lineman tells me that years ago the cops stopped even asking the phone company for an OK to monitor calls.”

While such highly visible programs as TIA have been (and still should be!) stopped, the less visible penetration of surveillance and “security” into our everyday lives continues unabated. Spying bus drivers would be merely ludicrous rather than insidious if not for the elevation of safety into a supreme political principle. We should reject both the “school bus watch” nonsense and the apolitical obsession with security and safety that make such programs possible.