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by Pete Edwards

This February, the Associated Press reported that "The war on terror has a new

front line - the school bus line. Financed by the Homeland Security Department, school bus drivers are being trained to watch for potential terrorists, people who may be casing their routes, or plotting to blow up their buses. Designers of the School Bus Watch program want to turn 600,000 bus drivers into an army of observers, like a counter-terrorism watch on wheels."

The new effort is part of Highway Watch, a safety program run by the American Trucking Associations and financed with $50 million in homeland security money. Highway Watch is similar to part of the now outlawed Homeland Security's (TIPS) Operation Terrorist Information and Prevention System which was struck

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from proposed homeland security legislation in 2002. The Bush White House touted TIPS as a new way to fight terrorism using parcel delivery people, meter readers, postal carriers and employees of the service industry as citizen spies. TIPS was scheduled to be introduced as a pilot project recruiting up to one million U.S. service workers in ten cities as volunteer citizen informants, assisting the government in its hunt for the terrorists among us.

Not everyone was happy with the prospect of citizen spies. Indeed, civil liberties groups and conservative organizations expressed outrage and there was an

opposition movement in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives which eventually restricted the TIPS part of the Homeland Security legislation. As a result, the government's description of the TIPS plan has become vaguer and more ambiguous. It has been suggested that the Highway Watch and the School Bus Watch programs are the latest effort in resurrecting the unpopular TIPS but making it more citizen friendly to make it appealing to the public.

When Tips was first suggested it required the recruitment of thousands of citizens who were willing to spy on their neighbors and report suspicious activity to the U.S. Department of Justice and other select federal agencies via an 800 hot-line. The recruitment of informants would be part of the Bush administration's Citizen Corps.

Most of the other Citizen Corps functions relate to assisting with disaster relief and emergency preparedness in the event of an act of terrorism or crime. TIPS,  was very different - and described as intensely threatening to basic civil liberties. If the Bush administration's estimates were correct, under TIPS the U.S. would have had a higher percentage of citizen informants than were enlisted by the former socialist East Germany through the notorious Stasi secret police.

According to a statement posted in 2002 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 report suspicious terrorist activity." But after the program met with bi-partisan opposition

as a threat to the privacy of ordinary U.S. citizens, the webesite was changed, using softer terms to try to dispel fears of a big brother spy network.

The implementation of the Highway Watch and the School Bus Watch program has been viewed as the thin edge of a reinvented TIPS wedge using school bus drivers to make the program acceptable using child safety.

With bus drivers becoming formal intelligence gatherers, the reach of homeland security is growing - not exactly what parents think of when their kids head to the bus stop. The program demands strong oversight, said John Rollins, a former senior Homeland Security intelligence official now with the Congressional Research Service. Otherwise, he said, some bus drivers could think of themselves as undercover agents.

"Today it's bus drivers, tomorrow it could be postal officials, and the next day, it could be, why don't we have this program in place for the people who deliver the newspaper to the door?" Rollins said. "We could quickly get into a society where we're all spying on each other. It may be well intentioned, but there is a concern of it going a bit too far."

Kenneth Trump, a school safety consultant said being prepared is not being alarmist. Denying and downplaying schools and school buses as potential terror targets here in the U.S., would be foolish.

When drivers finish their training, they get confidential School Bus Watch ID numbers. They are reminded never to profile people as suspicious based on culture or ethnicity but the concern is that intelligence gathering could become maliciously motivated and include ordinary U.S. citizens not involved in terrorist activity.
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