One of the largest cable TV companies in the United States is training its employees to look for suspicious behavior and report it to police under the guise of a neighborhood watch initiative. Since according to law enforcement and Homeland Security guidelines, suspicious behavior includes owning guns, being politically active, and having bumper stickers on your car, the cable guy’s next visit to your house may turn out to have more interesting consequences than you originally anticipated.“Operation Bright Eyes is designed to maximize the eyes and ears of Bright House Networks field service representatives and other employees to easily identify suspicious behavior and to quickly report criminal activities to police,” according to a Fox 35 report.
All current and new Bright House employees will receive training to help them use the ‘resources at their disposal’ to “become familiar with residents and activities in neighborhoods” and report anything they deem unusual to the authorities in order to “keep our neighborhoods safe”.
Since when was it the job of the cable guy to run around pretending to be an undercover cop? This program is ripe for abuse and another advancement in the tattle-tale stasi society being created in order to make the sheeple self-police their behavior, constantly aware that they are being watched by secret police and living in fear that big brother will catch any minor indiscretion.
The legacy of training Americans to spy on each other in the name of “safety” has its origins in Operation TIPS, which was supposedly nixed by Congress, a DOJ, FBI, DHS and FEMA coordinated program that would have recruited one in twenty-four Americans as domestic informants, a higher percentage than was used by the Stasi in Communist East Germany.
Government funding was cut after an outcry but private funding continues and the same program was introduced under a number of sub-divisions including AmeriCorps, SecureCorps and the Highway Watch program.
More recently, ABC News reported that “The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort…..to aid with criminal investigations.”
In July last year we reported on how hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as “Terrorism Liaison Officers” in Colorado, Arizona and California to watch for “suspicious activity” which is later fed into a secret government database.
Also last year, a New York Times feature article heartily celebrated the fact that an increasing number of Americans are becoming informants and turning in their neighbors and family members to the authorities in return for cash rewards. In a piece about a new program run by Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers, citing gas prices, foreclosure rates and runaway food price inflation, The Times lauds the fact that citizens are reporting on each other, ensuring “a substantial increase in Crime Stopper-related arrests and recovered property, as callers turn in neighbors, grandchildren or former boyfriends in exchange for a little cash.”
Forget Orwell’s 1984, this purebred tyranny is about as sophisticated as the wacky dictatorship portrayed in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 movie The Running Man, where citizens are reminded by huge TV screens placed on street corners that they can “earn a double bonus for reporting on a family member!”
Bright House Networks has 2.4 million customers and covers “several large cities including Tampa Bay and Orlando, Florida; Bakersfield, California; Indianapolis, Indiana; Detroit, Michigan; and Birmingham, Alabama; along with several other smaller regions in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.”
Perhaps that 2.4 million figure will begin to dwindle once customers find out that the cable guy is eyeing them up for suspicious activity.
What constitutes suspicious activity isn’t listed, but if it’s in line with law enforcement and Homeland Security guidelines – watch out.
As we have previously documented, people displaying suspicious behavior as defined by law enforcement authorities in documents such as the MAIC report, along with Homeland Security lexicon files, include Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumper stickers, people who own gold, or even people who fly a U.S. flag.
Homeland Security even equates people who express disagreement with the government with domestic extremists and terrorists. So if the cable guy see's hookmans cabl bar post or a Jones DVD in your TV cabinet, will that mandate a call to the cops?
There seems little need for President Obama to even create his promised “domestic security force,” and such a move would merely represent a centralization of what is already underway, since a plethora od programs that train Americans to report on each other are already firmly in place across the country.
