Home Ministry out to create an army of spies?

Members of Rela are being asked to “shop their neighbours” under a scheme announced by the government.

Rela is a volunteer paramilitary corp under the Home Ministry run by Prime Minister Najib Razak's cousin, Hishammuddin Hussein.

The ministry's secretary-general Mahmood Adam has announced that three million members of Rela, the Civil Defence and non-governmental organisations (NGO) would patrol the streets from August, to help the police tackle street crimes.

Under this new plan, ‘Rela would also serve as the eyes and ears of the government by gathering information on the needs of the people at the grassroots level’.

The joint effort between Rela and the police began last year and registered a drop of 17% in the overall crime rate. Mahmood hoped more volunteers would enrol.

He said, “We have more police personnel fighting crime as well as assistance from the General Operations Force and 5,000 Rela members. We are looking at getting members from Rela, Civil Defence and NGOs to also join in.”

Mahmood said that the training programme for the volunteers had already begun and patrols with the police, on a nationwide basis, would commence in August.

He said, “We are also expanding the patrol areas of identified hotspots in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, Johor and Penang when the Rela-police patrols were first started last year.”

Ministers will doubtless claim that the scheme will help tackle problems such as petty theft, loitering, prostitution, drug production, illegal immigration and anti-social behaviour.

But critics will insist that this is a “dangerous” example of the Home Ministry encouraging unwarranted snooping of Malaysians against each other.

Mahmood will presumably depend heavily on public-tip offs. But how will he tackle malicious tip-offs?

The ‘moral police’ is already inundated with malicious calls from people who are peeved that their advances were rejected. The aggrieved party is piqued and will not hesitate to make false reports of khalwat against the other party, to teach them a lesson.

So how will Mahmood’s personnel monitor each call to ensure it is not a malicious one?

This Rela activity is another excuse for a volunteer snooping force under the pretext of tackling crime. It is an invasion into our private lives. Are we going to become another China during the Cultural Revolution or a North Korea or an Iraq during the Saddam Hussien years?

A recent CIA report claimed that the Chinese Communist Party currently employs a growing network of student informants who monitor political expression on university campuses and denounce professors and students for politically subversive or unconventional views.

Established in 1989 after the Tienanmen Square protests, the principal objective of the Student Informant System [SIS] is to ensure campus stability and to control the debate and discussion of politically sensitive issues.

The report added, “Students have had their scholarships revoked and their academic records penalised because of information provided by student informants that is sometimes highly subjective, such as facial expressions.”

“The SIS employs traditional political spying and denunciation techniques, seeking to create a ‘white terror’ (bai se kong bu) environment on campus — in which students and teachers fear surveillance more than arrest — to achieve and maintain influence and control.”

Malaysians will be horrified to learn that many Malaysian students studying overseas report that they are being ‘spied’ upon by agents of our government, who masquerade as students.

All these point to the insecurities with the BN government.

Najib must be really alarmed for if he cannot keep a check on his citizens by banning or censoring the internet, he will create “an army of citizen spies”.

We know that the state or local government pays for the police, using the taxes collected from us. So what is the police doing these days?

Three million Rela volunteer spies is worrying.

If the population of Malaysia is 28 million, then we have three million Rela policing 25 million of us. The demographics of Malaysia states that 68% of the population in 2010 is in the 15-64 years age bracket (or 19 million people). It is reasonable to assume that the government would want to keep an eye on this age group rather than the very young or the elderly.

Therefore, a further breakdown means that the three million Rela members will be spying on 16 million people. This is a shocking ratio of roughly 1 Rela informing on 5 members of the public.

When the Stazi was at its peak, there were 180,000 informants spying on a population of 16 million East Germans. East Germany was known to be a police state but their ratio of informants to population, is roughly 1:100, as opposed to Malaysia’s 1:10.

Mahmood said that “Rela would also serve as the eyes and ears of the government by gathering information on the needs of the people at the grassroots level”.

We say that this is state sanctioned spying. Police state? Definitely. - Malaysia Chronicle