Irregular Times

Time to Investigate Eagle Eyes Program

by Peregrin Wood @ 7:36 am.
Filed under General, Homeland Insecurity, Liberty

One thing America has learned in the last week is that George W. Bush has directed the government to engage in not just one program to spy against law-abiding American citizens, but has created multiple, simultaneous programs to spy on us.

So, in response to these revelations, we need a broad investigation that examines all of the government spying programs used against Americans - not just a single program that has received the greatest amount of publicity. In such a broad investigation, an inquiry into the use of the military’s Eagle Eyes spy program.

Eagle Eyes, run by the Air Force, encourages private American citizens, as well as Air Force personnel, to become informers, reporting what they see in their communities to military authorities.

The Eagle Eyes program asks Americans to report all “suspicious activity”, but defines suspicious activity so broadly that the citizen spies recruited by Eagle Eyes could be just be reporting on the everyday activities of their neighbors and coworkers, or on peaceful, lawful expressions of political dissent.

The following items are among those taken, word for word, from the Air Force Eagle Eyes web site’s description of the kind of “suspicious behaviors” that volunteer citizen spies should report to the military: the use of cameras (either still or video), note taking, drawing diagrams, annotating on maps, or using binoculars or other vision-enhancing devices.

People who don’t seem to belong in the workplace, neighborhood, business establishment, or anywhere else… This category is hard to define, but the point is that people know what looks right and what doesn’t look right in their neighborhoods, office spaces, commutes, etc, and if a person just doesn’t seem like he or she belongs, there’s probably a reason for that.

People moving around from place to place without any apparent purpose and doing it, perhaps, many times.

Given what we’ve learned over the last week about gigantic government databases recording anti-war protests, espionage programs tracking peaceful environmental activists, and Bush’s decision to spy on emails and telephone calls outside the law, we have a right to know what kind of information has been gathered through the Eagle Eyes spying program, and how that information has been used.