New anti-terrorism measures in the US summon the ghost of McCarthyism. Nyier Abdou probes what happens when Big Brother meets war hysteria Click to view caption The war on terrorism has become a culture unto itself -- a new kind of Pax Americana that at its best unifies nations in a spirit of justice, but at its worst stokes the fires of xenophobic paranoia. The US after 11 September is a nation at war, but wartime anxiety, even during the Cold War, has never been this nebulous. The enemy is ephemeral, shrouded in an ideology of hate and spread inconspicuously across the globe. The administration of President George W Bush has moved swiftly to banish uncertainty with concrete action. Abroad, this has meant the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and shouts and murmurs over a renewed military campaign in Iraq. At home, however, measures are more insidious, putting an unapologetic squeeze on civil liberties in the name of security. Nowhere is this conflict more salient than in the outcry raised over US Attorney General John Ashcroft's proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), planned to launch in pilot cities this month. Designed as part of the administration's "Citizen Corps" initiative, TIPS was conceived as a way for Americans to take an active role in guarding the safety of the homeland. The programme would invite a fleet of workers to report any "suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity" to a central office, which would be a subsidiary of the newly developed Department of Homeland Security. These workers -- "American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees", according to the Citizen Corps Web site -- are presumably in a unique position to identify unusual activity. Unfortunately, say civil rights watchdogs, they are also likely to carry with them racial biases and misinformation. Recruiting millions of postmen and metre readers to keep a watchful eye on American homes adds up not only to an Orwellian nightmare, says Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), but it amounts to sidestepping the constitutional rights awarded by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures". "Our protections from search in the Fourth Amendment apply to police, not to the utility worker or to the next-door neighbour," Hoofnagle told Al-Ahram Weekly. By empowering private citizens to take on information gathering roles, any responsibility for discrimination or unfair treatment would not fall on the shoulders of government authorities. "TIPS can violate the constitution by allowing the police to circumvent traditional protections against searches," says Hoofnagle. "A privatised police force is an unaccountable one under US law." In his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, Ashcroft defended "Operation TIPS" by playing down fears that the programme would spawn a nation of Peeping Toms, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has charged. But Kit Gage, president of the Washington-based National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom and director of the First Amendment Foundation, sees only trouble ahead should "Operation SNITCH", as she calls it, go forward. "The government is not talking about doing any comprehensive training of the people who volunteer to do this work," Gage told the Weekly. The ability to discern terrorist activity is a delicate business and poor judgment on the part of informants is bound to get in the way. Gage notes that preparatory acts might include using bank machines, talking in foreign languages on pay phones, talking together quietly in groups and living in groups of single people. "These are also the same things millions of others do daily in the process of their normal lives," says Gage. "The best-trained law enforcement [teams] have a hard enough time distinguishing between lawful political dissent activity and terrorist activity. Deputised civilians may well have a harder time." On a more practical level, enthusiastic patriots will probably feel obliged to do their part and call in all manner of information, thus generating mountains of predominantly useless data that law enforcement agencies will then have to sift through. Robert Higgs, senior fellow in political economy at the California think tank the Independent Institute and the editor of The Independent Review, suggests that this drawback is so obvious that the government must have other motives. "The likelihood that TIPS informants would provide information useful in preventing acts of terrorism in the United States is virtually nil," Higgs told the Weekly. "The authorities, one presumes, understand this reality." Higgs reasons that the impetus behind the programme lies in fuelling the war mentality. "By involving so many millions of citizens, [TIPS] would help the government to keep the populace in a state of fear," says Higgs. "And the government would then be better able to achieve its policy ends under the guise that its policies are protecting the populace." Those who support TIPS say fears of McCarthyism are overblown, arguing that the programme is a natural extension of local "neighbourhood watches". But should TIPS go through, it seems more than likely that the most immediately affected portion of the public would be Arab and Muslim Americans. Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), in Washington, told the Weekly that the government's tendencies toward interrogation and monitoring are at odds with the very goal of security. "Real security is attained through real anti-terrorism measures," says Al- Marayati. "What's happening here is that we're losing the trust of the Muslim community." Also pointing to the enormous amount of "inaccurate information" the government will have to filter through, Al-Marayati sees the furore over TIPS as more of a marketing tool. "Every day, the government has to manufacture news on the war on terror," says Al- Marayati. "TIPS may not make any sense, but it's good news, that will consume days, if not weeks, of discussion." "I suspect that Ashcroft loses no sleep over the prospect that Arabs or Muslims might be singled out unfairly," says the Independent Institute's Higgs. Comparisons to Orwell's 1984 are widespread, but perhaps the more appropriate comparison is to dictatorial regimes denounced by the US, among them Iraq and North Korea, not to mention Afghanistan during the Taliban era. Pointing to the hundreds of "secret detentions" since 11 September and the lack of judicial proceedings, Higgs suggests that 11 September only accelerated an existing drift in the US toward a more authoritarian regime. "Already the government has in place extensive means of keeping under surveillance all Americans as they go about their daily life, by monitoring their communications, their financial dealings, their labour-force participation, their health care, and other aspects of their lives," says Higgs. "This sort of routine, broad-scale surveillance is a hallmark of every un-free society." The EPIC's Hoofnagle agrees, saying that secret arrests and vague terrorist alerts have "strained" the Bush administration's credibility. "Unfortunately, our institutions are beginning to resemble those [authoritarian] controlled environments." As strong evidence of this, Hoofnagle cites new guidelines released by Ashcroft that allow the FBI to "prospectively search for terrorism leads by infiltrating places of worship, by attending protests, and by mining databases of consumer behaviour". "'Operation SNITCH' certainly is the kind of programme you are more likely to see in fascist kinds of governments, where the government is afraid of and trying to crush political dissent," remarks the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom's Gage. "Many governments fall prey to these fears and yield to the wrongheaded impulse to crush dissent -- including, at significant points, the US." The TIPS proposal may end up derailed before it has a chance to prove its worth. The Homeland Security bill that is moving through Congress directly rules out Operation TIPS as a function of the new Homeland Security Department. The larger outcome, however, is that a sense of mutual distrust has been sown back into the fabric of American life. Public debate over this kind of proposal justifies its premise: that ordinary Americans are capable of discerning activity that potentially threatens "homeland security". Asked if he thought Americans would balk at becoming a nation of spies, the Independent Institute's Higgs predicts that some people will certainly protest, "but the great majority are sheep, and will go along with whatever the government proposes, no matter how Draconian." Salam Al-Marayati, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told the Weekly that the group had been turned down for a meeting with President Bush. "I'm beginning to wonder if people in the White House really know what they're doing," says Al-Marayati. "It's not about culture, it's not about 'marketing' -- it's about policy." Looking at the broader picture, Al-Marayati remarks that the instigation of TIPS and the kind of invasive monitoring being justified in the name of security "does not bode well for democracy in America". What it does, he added, is "give the green light" to human rights oppressors around the globe. "That's the message we're sending out, and it's a bad message for the US." Human rights, says Al- Marayati, are among the worst casualties in the war on terror. "We condemned other countries for using excuses to violate human rights, and now all that has been completely forgotten."
