[Corporations] Surveillance City

[George Mokray]

Scott Ritter
from http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1110-03.htm

That same month, I inspected another facility, located near the 
wealthy Al Mansur district of Baghdad, that housed a combined unit of 
Hussein's personal security force and the Iraqi Intelligence Service. 
The mission of this unit was to track the movement and activities of 
every Iraqi residing in that neighborhood straddling the highway that 
links the presidential palace with Saddam International Airport.

A chilling realization overcame us when we entered a gymnasium-sized 
room and saw that the floors were painted in a giant map of the 
neighborhood. The streets were lined with stacked metallic "in-box" 
trays - each stack represented a house or apartment building. A 
three-story building, for example, contained three levels of trays; 
each tray contained dossiers on each citizen living on that floor. 
Similar units existed in other neighborhoods, including those deemed 
"anti-regime."

Hussein's government was - and its remnants are - intimately familiar 
with every square inch of Baghdad: who was loyal, where they live, 
and who they associated with. (The same can be said about all of 
Iraq, for that matter, even the Kurdish and Shiite regions.) This 
information allows officials from the remnants of Hussein's 
intelligence and security services to hide undetected among a 
sympathetic population. Indeed, a standard quotient among 
counterinsurgency experts is that for every 100 active insurgents 
fielded, there must be 1,000 to 10,000 active supporters in the local 
population.