Operation TIPS and Operation Dob In A Red

Spot the similarities between the Bush administrations failed TIPS programme and Trevor Loudon's Orwellian Dob In A Red. Operation Dob In A Red is Trevor Loudon's latest attempt to outdo the Stazi by paying informants in chocolate to dob in their mates to be added to his bunker wall of newspaper cuttings and array of photographs of Green Party members he is currently stalking.

Above is an artists impression of how the image in question may be viewed in the unwell mind of McCarthyism suffering Trevor Loudon.

Now something about Operation TIPS

From Wikipedia

Operation TIPS, where the last part is an acronym for the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, was a program designed by President George W. Bush to have United States citizens report suspicious activity. It came under intense scrutiny in July 2002 when the Washington Post alleged in an editorial that the program was vaguely defined, and investigative political journalist Ritt Goldstein observed in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald [1] that TIPS would provide America with a higher percentage of 'citizen spies' than the former East Germany had under the notorious Stasi secret police.

In the days immediately following Goldstein's revelation, publications such as the libertarian magazine Reason, and then the progressive Boston Globe, emphasized the Stasi analogy, widely highlighting Operation TIPS' shortcomings. TIPS was subsequently cancelled after concerns over civil liberties violations.

Goldstein later observed that he broke news of Operation TIPS on March 10 in Spain's second largest daily, El Mundo, but that he struggled until July before finding a major English language paper which would print the story.

The program's website implied that US workers who had access to private citizens' homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, would be reporting on what was in people's homes if it were deemed "suspicious." The initial start of the program was to be August 2002 and would have included one million workers in ten US cities and then to be expanded.

Operation TIPS was accused of doing an "end run" around the United States Constitution, and the original wording of the website was subsequently changed. President Bush's then-Attorney General, John Ashcroft denied that private residences would be surveilled by private citizens operating as government spies. Mr. Ashcroft nonetheless defended the program, equivocating on whether the reports by citizens on fellow citizens would be maintained in government databases. While saying that the information would not be in a central database as part of Operation TIPS, he maintained that the information would still be kept in databases by various law enforcement agencies.

The databases were an explicit concern of various civil liberties groups (on both the left and the right) who felt that such databases could include false information about citizens with no way for those citizens to know that such information was compiled about them, nor any way for them to correct the information, nor any way for them to confront their accusers.

The United States Postal Service, after at first seeming supportive of the program, later resisted its personnel being included in this program, reasoning that if mail carriers became perceived as law enforcement personnel that they would be placed in danger at a level for which they could not reasonably be expected to be prepared, and that the downside of the program hence vastly outweighed any good that it could accomplish. The National Association of Letter Carriers, a postal labor union, was especially outspoken in its opposition.

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