Nationwide “Waste Watch” spy program another alarming reminder of a society in terminal decay
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, December 17, 2010
Former FBI agents are helping local authorities train thousands of garbage collectors across the country as a nationwide internal spy force to report “suspicious activity” to police in yet another example of how America is turning into an East German-style informant society as the country decays from within.
Local news reports out of Albany concerning the new “Waste Watch” program, wherein garbage collectors are trained by former FBI agents to look for suspicious activity, were replete with nodding drones expressing how delighted they were that they were being spied on by their fellow Americans.
Your local trash man will “help prevent crime” by “reporting anything suspicious they observe along the route,” reports Fox News 23.
Although the program is camouflaged in civic-minded virtues of reporting crashes, fires or emergencies, it also includes “anything out of ordinary,” as well as “suspicious situations,” which, given the fact that the Department of Defense now considers any form of protest to be a suspicious sign of “low-level terrorism,” could amount to almost anything.
Waste Watch is already active in 100 communities across the country. Given the fact that the Albany program alone has trained a hundred employees to watch for suspicious activity, the total figure of informants could already number at least 10,000 nationwide.
The program bears similarities to the Highway Watch initiative, which before it lost government funding, used ex-CIA and FBI agents to train bus drivers, truckers and van operators to become “terrorist hunters” . The Highway Watch website now states that the program has been superseded by “another trucking security program” run by Homeland Security, and encourages truckers to call the TSA National Operations Center if they want to “report a suspicious security event”.
It also harks back to Operation TIPS, a program which encouraged people who had access to Americans’ homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, to report back to the authorities if they saw anything deemed “suspicious”.
TIPS was ironically disbanded when it was expressly prohibited with the passage of the 2003 Homeland Security Act at the behest of then majority leader Dick Armey, “Who was angered by the Justice Department’s plan to enlist millions of Americans to report any suspicious signs that might link some of the rest of us to terrorism. Armey, a conservative Republican libertarian, said he would not allow a law enabling “Americans to spy on one another.”
However, under a myriad of new programs being set up by both federal and state authorities, that is precisely what’s unfolding, not least with Big Sis Janet Napolitano’s infamous Wal-Mart initiative to remind Americans to report suspicious activity as they are buying goods at the checkout, a program that has also been expanded to 9,000 federal buildings as well as sports stadiums and other facilities.
As we have repeatedly warned, history shows that governments training citizens to spy on each other is a sign of a society in terminal decay. Such programs never lead to a more secure society, but instead breed suspicion, distrust, fear and resentment amongst the population. The only “benefit” that such programs have ever achieved is allowing the state to more easily identify and persecute political dissidents while discouraging the wider population from engaging in any criticism against the government.
Telling low paid government workers who, like garbage collectors, aren’t noted for their intelligence, that they are secret terrorist hunters for the state isn’t going to make anything more secure, it’s only going to affirm the fact that the United States is a banana republic decaying from within. If America is going to have an internal spy force watching the behavior of citizens, can’t it at least be professionally organized? I’m thinking KGB.
In all seriousness, Given the fact that local and federal authorities have identified support for the Constitution, political activism of any nature, carrying an Americans flag, and virtually any mild form of dissent whatsoever as domestic extremism under the MIAC report and innumerable others, one wonders what garbage collectors have been told to look out for by FBI agents, although you can pretty much guarantee that drunk illegal aliens joyriding in vehicles without insurance will be less of a concern than ordinary Americans trying to mind their own business, forgetting that they now live in a police state where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
