Cheka in Amerika: Spy On Each Other

A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.

"For too long, we've treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation's collective security," Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.

"This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger."

Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory," she said. "If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now."

Napolitano urged a "much broader society response" in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.

Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.

"You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities," she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina," she said.

"So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important."

In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.

Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.

"There's actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you're in an airport and you see a package left with no one around," she said.

However, she stressed she was not advocating "a culture of spying on one another."

She insisted that President Barack Obama's administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

"We have to be careful," she said. "That's a balance to be struck." [Like in Guantanamo?] More