A reporting source sent this to Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list. TIPS, you will recall, is the administration plan to have us become informants on one another’s suspicious activities to assist the WoT®, Eastern-European style:

Teamsters President James Hoffa, Jr. is preparing to endorse the Bush administration’s TIPS plan, according to Washington sources close to the labor union. Teamsters is the largest union in the U.S. and its members include United Parcel Service (UPS) workers. The decision of the Teamsters to back TIPS is solely Hoffa’s, and no union vote was taken, or is planned, the source said. Many Teamsters are more left-of-center and are unhappy with Hoffa’s close relationship with Republicans and the Bush White House and view his pending endorsement of TIPS as an attempt to win favor with Bush, the source said.

Related: The Societal Costs of Surveillance

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So the recent brainstorm by the Justice Department to enlist couriers, meter readers, cable installers and telephone repairmen to snoop on people’s private lives for anything “suspicious” dredged a cold and until now forgotten feeling from the pit of my stomach. Many have objected that such a program would violate civil liberties and basic American principles. But stoking people’s fear to set neighbor upon neighbor, service worker upon client, those who belong against those who don’t, does something more: it erodes the soul of the watcher and the watched, replacing healthy national pride with mute suspicion, breeding insular individuals more concerned with self-preservation than with society at large. Ultimately it creates a climate that is inherently antithetical to security. NY Times