September 5, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
The American Prospect magazine’s Internet edition criticizes a terrorism-prevention program included in the Bush administration’s proposed volunteerism effort, the USA Freedom Corps.
“Carefully tucked away among innocuous sounding proposals, such as tutoring inner-city children,” the article says, “was a potential ticking civil-liberties time bomb known as the Terrorist Information and Prevention System, or Operation TIPS for short.”
Citing the TIPS Web site, it says the program would enlist American workers in “a unique position” to report any suspicious activities in public places.
“TIPS could, theoretically, turn out to be, if not innocuous, much less nakedly Orwellian than it sounds,” the article acknowledges. But it also questions whether it could become a Big Brother-like entity with a loose definition of suspicious activity, including “such arguably objectionable but legal activities as shuffling down the street in baggy pants or shorting telecom stocks.”
The article concludes, “In the unfortunate but necessary tradeoffs between security and freedom, the latter should be given real weight.”
The article is available at http://www.prospect.org.
