New York Magazine  Skip to content, or skip to search.  Skip to
content, or skip to search.  Outta Sight  HBO and Showtime both
look at the federal witness-protection program and report that
being invisible isn't the same thing as being free.   What's
your point? Forest Whitaker (left) and Tom Sizemore in HBO's
Witness Protection.    Toward the end of Witness Protection
(Saturday, December 11; 8 to 9:45 p.m.; HBO), we are told that a
government program started in 1970 by the Nixon administration
with the idea of accommodating maybe 40 people a year now
enlists more than 600 annually; that there are some 16,000
Americans out there somewhere under assumed names and
counterfeit identities, a ghost colony of turncoats, tattletales
and/or whistle-blowers, and their wives and children, an
archipelago of cover stories. I find it hard to attach a meaning
to these numbers. They float, but they do not signify, in a
foggy paranoia. In Manhattan alone, there would seem to be at
least as many nail salons. Greater numbers