F.B.I. Wants You To Report Your Neighbors

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.-Monitoring America

I'm sure "conservatives" support all this, though it smells awfully like the kind of thing they used to criticize repressive communist regimes like Castro's Cuba for doing.

Since their creation in 1960, Cuba also has relied on the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, CDRs) to conduct intensive monitoring in every Cuban neighborhood. The CDRs are Cuba's largest organization and according to President Castro, comprise 91 percent of Cuba's population. Juan Contino, a member of the Council of State, coordinates CDR activities. Castro lauded the CDRs when they were first launched as a "system of collective revolutionary vigilance so that everyone will know who everyone else is ... what they devote themselves to, who they meet with, what activities they take part in." Led by block captains, the CDRs carry out numerous neighborhood activities, in which non-participation can be suspect, and maintain tight surveillance of suspected government opponents.-Cuba's Routine Repression

Yes, suspected government opponents. When Cuba did it, it was evil and a sign of dictatorship. When America does the same thing, it's to defend freedom (of course). I think today's phony, lying, hypocritical conservatives (and "liberals", too) owe Fidel Castro an apology.