Operation Brown Shirt

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this week floated an idea to start a nonprofit group that would collect information on private citizens, flag suspicious activity, and send names of suspicious people to his department. Read the rest HERE.

This is nothing more than a repackaged version of Defense Department's now-dead Total Information Awareness program (operation snitch) it was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now! It's a mirror image of Operation TIPS—the Terrorism Information and Prevention System—is one of the failed initiatives of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism.” According to a statement posted on the government’s web site, TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letters carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to spy on fellow Americans and report suspicious activity.”