D'ya see this yet, Poet? Your 'stomping' grounds...
...roughly.... -g-
A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
Ashcroft vs. Americans
7/17/2002
PERATION TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - is a
scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated. Plans for its pilot phase,
to start in August, have Operation TIPS recruiting a million letter carriers, meter
readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access to private homes as
informants to report to the Justice Department any activities they think suspicious.
This is not an updating of George Orwell's ''1984.'' It is not a satire on the paranoid
fantasies of right-wing kooks who see black helicopters swooping across their big
sky. It will be a nationwide program run by Attorney General John Ashcroft's
Justice Department. If it is allowed to start up and gather steam, it will begin in 10
cities and then expand everywhere, enrolling millions of Americans to spy on their
neighbors.
On the Web site of President Bush's new Citizen Corps program, this assault on the
Constitution is described without any hint of irony as ''a national reporting system
that allows these workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize
unusual events, to report suspicious activity.''
After the Berlin Wall came down and communism vanished into the dustbin of
history, Czechs, East Germans, Poles, and Hungarians had to suffer through
wrenching revelations about the reporting systems their totalitarian regimes had
instituted. The Communist Party bosses in those captive nations justified the
pervasive recruitment of citizens to inform on their neighbors as a requirement of
security and a proof of loyalty to the party, the revolution, or the working class.
If Ashcroft wishes to assess the likely effect of the snooping regime he is about to
implement, he could ask postal workers from the old days in Prague to explain what
happens to a society's sense of solidarity when everybody on the block assumes
that the mailman is telling the secret police that Comrade X has been reading
bourgeois books.
For a bit of the shock therapy Ashcroft and his fellow travelers seem to need, they
ought to consult some of the citizens in the former East Germany who discovered,
when looking into their Stasi files, that under the former regime they had been spied
upon for years by a husband or wife.
Ashcroft's informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it violates civil liberties
in a narrow legal sense or because it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent
terrorism by overloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about
Americans who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPS should be
stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would give Stalin and the KGB a
delayed triumph in the Cold War - in the name of the Bush administration's war
against terrorism.
This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on 7/17/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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