Free Republic

Ex-Agents: FBI Recruits Violent Informants By JEFF DONN The Associated Press For decades, in cities from coast to coast, FBI agents recruited killers and crime bosses as informants and then looked the other way as they continued to commit violent crimes. When the practice first came to light in Boston - unleashing an ongoing investigation that has already sent one agent to prison for obstruction of justice - FBI officials in Washington portrayed it as an aberration. But Associated Press interviews with nine former FBI agents - men with a combined 190 years of experience in more than 25 bureau...

State board suspends Nationwide Arena beer sales for 10 days Saturday, February 22, 2003 Robert Ruth THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Fans who have suffered with the Columbus Blue Jackets through a mediocre season soon could have trouble drowning their sorrows at Nationwide Arena. The three-member Ohio Liquor Control Commission on Thursday voted unanimously to suspend the alcohol licenses of all beer stands in the Downtown arena for 10 days, ending March 30, for selling beer to underage informants in February 2002. Officials of Midwest Sportservice of Buffalo, N.Y., which operates the beer stands, could appeal the ruling to the Franklin County...

Congressmen Condemn FBI's Mob Ties BOSTON – A congressional panel's draft report accuses the FBI and Justice Department of knowingly using killers as informants and failing to fully cooperate with the committee's investigation. The Committee on Government Reform concluded the handling of gangland informants by the Boston FBI and federal prosecutors was "one of the greatest failures" in the history of federal law enforcement. The full committee was expected to vote on the draft report in the next few weeks. Obtained by the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, the report concludes federal law enforcement, through its actions from 1965 to...

Pupils as young as 13 are being encouraged to disclose sensitive information about their parents to the Government to help discover why they might be failing at school. Details of problems such as drink and drug abuse, depression, eating disorders and frequent domestic rows would be sought by advisers. The data,gathered without the consent of parents by the Connexions Service, which supplies careers and personal advisers to schools, could be shared with a number of government departments, the police and health authorities. The methods used to collect this data, its storage and future use, is worrying child mental health...

<p>But perched in his rig at a truck stop near Jessup, Md., George Freeman shook his pony-tailed head at a proposed terrorism informant network that would rely on millions of American workers to feed the government tips on suspicious activity.</p> <p>"It's going to be overused and abused, especially with people so nervous as it is," said Freeman, 45, who hauls produce cross-country. "You're going to have people running every which way looking for terrorists and their 15 minutes of glory."</p>

US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies By Ritt Goldstein July 15 2002 The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity". Civil liberties groups have already warned that, with the passage earlier this year of the...