Time to Investigate Eagle Eyes Program

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: