Your Neighbor Is Watching
Peter Y. Sussman, AlterNet
July 18, 2002
Operation Snitch is coming next month to a neighborhood near you.
The government doesn't call it that, of course. The administration's program
has been christened, more benignly, Operation TIPS -- the Terrorism
Information and Prevention System. But the national snooping network, despite
reassuring noises from the Justice Department and the Homeland Security
chief, will be anything but benign.
The government says it will recruit millions of informers to serve as "extra
eyes and ears for law enforcement" at the local level, reporting what the
citizen-snoops consider "suspicious and potentially terrorist-related
activity" -- like a bumper sticker in Arabic on a neighbor's car, perhaps?
Over the past year, administration officials have assured us that the
suspension of civil rights they initiated in the panic following the Sept. 11
attacks was not intended for law-abiding folks like you and me -- only for
those malignant characters, mostly foreign, suspected of "terrorism." But
that begs the crucial question: Suspected by whom? Now we have an answer:
your neighborhood informer -- a bus driver, say, or the meter reader.
In the pilot stage of this "national reporting system," scheduled for launch
in August, there will be 1 million workers. A more ambitious "national
rollout" will follow, adding more millions of informers. Who will be chosen
as citizen-snoops? The administration says "truck drivers, bus drivers, train
conductors, mail carriers, utility readers, ship captains, and port personnel
are ideally suited to help in the anti-terrorism effort because their
routines allow them to recognize unusual events."
The words "unusual" and "suspicious" are used synonymously and are key to
understanding why the program can only become what Homeland Security chief
Tom Ridge denies it will be -- a network of citizens spying on each other.
Back in the 1960s, I and scores of others received threatening letters from a
paramilitary organization called the Minutemen of California, a group of
self-styled "patriots" who practiced with weapons in the Sierra for the day
when they would be called upon to save America from a Communist takeover.
Their unsigned "Dear Comrade" letters said in part: "It has come to our
attention that in the past you have made unpatriotic statements. You have
also participated in certain activities which are deemed detrimental to the
preservation of our Republic."
An investigation of the mailed threats focused on a mail carrier, who chose
to resign rather than face a Post Office hearing for misusing his official
position. That man had delivered my mail one day a week, as a substitute
carrier. He knew who was sending me mail. He must have thought he knew
suspicious activity when he saw it, and to him that apparently included mail
sent by organizations he personally deemed subversive, including Jewish
newspapers.
Now, 36 years later, the man checking up on me will not be a self-appointed
watchdog for an ultra-right-wing paramilitary group. His snooping will be
sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Justice. In recent decades, we have all
read about similar government-organized networks of citizen-snoops. They are
common tools of secret police in nations usually characterized as
"totalitarian" -- places like the Soviet-era East Germany. And we certainly
have shameful examples in our own history of mass suspicion run amok.
Even in the past year, thousands of our neighbors have been rounded up and
held incommunicado, without access to the constitutionally guaranteed
protections of the American judicial system. Others, who were not arrested,
were nevertheless shunned, vilified -- even shot at -- by their neighbors
because of their ancestry, religion or skin color; because they wore head
wrappings, or because they were otherwise suspiciously "different" from their
neighbors.
No one can know yet how the new national network of citizen-snoops will work.
(Wednesday, the Postal Service announced it would not take part in Operation
TIPS.) But based on past experience, I think I can guess the color, religion
and nationality of most of the people whose activities our fellow citizens
will find "suspicious" or "unusual."
Survival tips for August: Be nice to the meter reader, the mail carrier and
the bus conductor. Beware of associating with people who look different or
corresponding with organizations with foreign names. And, above all, don't
look suspicious.
Peter Y. Sussman is a Bay Area writer and editor and the co-author with
Dannie M. Martin of "Committing Journalism" (W.W. Norton).
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