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US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies - smh.com.au
(Ritt Goldstein, smh.com.au, July 15, 2002)
The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. . . . The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity" . . . Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits. . . . A pilot program, described on the government Web site www.citizencorps.gov, is scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants participating in the first stage. Assuming the program is initiated in the 10 largest US cities, that will be 1 million informants for a total population of almost 24 million, or one in 24 people. . . . The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted.

[Hagerty comment: This article was pointed out to me by a friend who is a survivor of the Soviet Union's draconian surveillance programs. Here is what he had to say about it:
I have very uneasy feelings about it. It strongly reminds me of the system implemented in the former Soviet Union, as early as 1918, to fight terrorists and counterrevolutionaries.
I do not know how many actual terrorists were caught by KGB during seven decades of perpetual existence of civil informant system, however, I do know it caused arrests and imprisonment of over 100,000,000 (!) people during the same period of time.

posted by Lorenzo 2:59 PM