ZGram - 7/28/2002 - "A Boston Globe Editorial: Ashcroft versus Americans"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 28, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

There have been so many protests about the "Snitch Program", as it is 
called, that the government seems to have backed off a bit and now 
talks only about "voluntary" snitching - and not utilizing whole 
industries like letter carriers, for instance.  That is a good thing, 
which does not mean the last word has yet been spoken.  Below is a 
representative editorial that shows how people feel about that 
utterly odious government proposal unworthy of a Western-style 
democracy:

[START]

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.

[END]

This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on 7/17/2002.