AmeriSnitch

With the familiar strains of "Heeeeere's Johnny" resounding throughout the auditorium, professional sidekick Ed McMahon introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C., in early March. Ashcroft was unveiling a new and expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program. He announced a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs' Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

Up to now, Neighborhood Watch has been a fairly low-key crime-prevention tool focused on break-ins and burglaries. But all that is changing, as the Bush Administration has earmarked it for a broader role--surveillance in the service of the "war on terrorism."

"President Bush has announced that, with the help of the National Sheriffs' Association, the Neighborhood Watch Program will be taking on new significance," according to the government's web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html . "Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be supervising the program. "Terrorism prevention" is now part of the "routine mission" of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site says.

This "could fuel Cold War-style discrimination and censorship," says the American Civil Liberties Union, which sees the Neighborhood Watch initiative as part of an "ongoing pattern of erosion of basic civil liberties in America in the name of unproven security measures."

"By asking neighborhood groups to report on people who are 'unfamiliar' or who act in ways that are 'suspicious' or 'not normal,' our government is unconstructively fear-mongering, and fueling the already rampant ethnic and religious scapegoating," says ACLU President Nadine Strossen.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration's plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS "will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity," says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be "a national reporting system. . . . Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available."

A Justice Department spokeswoman says TIPS was developed by a working group made up of people from the Department of Justice and several other agencies. When asked about the identity of members of the working group, she says she is unable to disclose their names at this time, adding it is "too soon to speak to the people involved."

TIPS will involve workers who, in the course of their daily activities, are well situated to be "extra eyes and ears" in the struggle against terrorism, she says. The mission is to "report suspicious activity and not to report suspicious-looking people."

But that does not reassure Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio. When I ask him about Operation TIPS and its one million snitches, he takes a deep breath.

"It appears we are being transformed from an information society to an informant society," he says. "Do the math. One tip a day per person and within a year the whole country will be turned in, and we can put up a big fence around the country, and we'll all be safe."