OPERATION TIPS--the Terrorism Information andPrevention System--is a scheme that Joseph Stalin would haveappreciated. Plans for its pilot phase, to start in August, haveOperation TIPS recruiting a million letter carriers, meter readers,cable technicians, and other workers with access to private homes asinformants to report to the Justice Department any activities theythink suspicious.
This is not an updating of George Orwell's''1984.'' It is not a satire on the paranoid fantasies of right-wingkooks who see black helicopters swooping across their big sky. Itwill be a nationwide program run by Attorney General John Ashcroft'sJustice Department. If it is allowed to start up and gather steam, itwill begin in 10 cities and then expand everywhere, enrollingmillions of Americans to spy on their neighbors.
On the Web site of President Bush's new CitizenCorps program, this assault on the Constitution is described withoutany hint of irony as ''a national reporting system that allows theseworkers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognizeunusual events, to report suspicious activity.''
After the Berlin Wall came down and communismvanished into the dustbin of history, Czechs, East Germans, Poles,and Hungarians had to suffer through wrenching revelations about thereporting systems their totalitarian regimes had instituted. TheCommunist Party bosses in those captive nations justified thepervasive recruitment of citizens to inform on their neighbors as arequirement of security and a proof of loyalty to the party, therevolution, or the working class.
If Ashcroft wishes to assess the likely effect ofthe snooping regime he is about to implement, he could ask postalworkers from the old days in Prague to explain what happens to asociety's sense of solidarity when everybody on the block assumesthat the mailman is telling the secret police that Comrade X has beenreading bourgeois books.
For a bit of the shock therapy Ashcroft and hisfellow travelers seem to need, they ought to consult some of thecitizens in the former East Germany who discovered, when looking intotheir Stasi files, that under the former regime they had been spiedupon for years by a husband or wife.
Ashcroft's informant corps is a vile idea notmerely because it violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense orbecause it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism byoverloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports aboutAmericans who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPSshould be stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would giveStalin and the KGB a delayed triumph in the Cold War - in the name ofthe Bush administration's war against terrorism.
This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on7/17/2002.
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