Informers: The new drive to get Americans to spy on one another

It should come as no surprise that governments throughout history have enlisted their citizens to spy on one another. Some publicly stated reasons have included stopping subversives from overthrowing the government, catching foreign spies and agents, and stopping terrorist attacks.

For at least the fourth time in a little over a century, the U.S. government is publicly trying to enlist its citizens into a vast network of spies who will report behavior the current administration doesn't like. For the record the previous three times were:

1. The first Red Scare between 1917 and 1920 which rounded up thousands of supposed sympathizers of the Russian Revolution and imprisoned them, proving that such activities do not depend on which party is in charge of the federal government since, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was president at the time.


2. The second Red Scare, often called the McCarthy Era, in the late 1940s and early 1950s after U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who publicly accused many prominent actors and writers, government employees and others of being communists disloyal to the United States and asking them to name others who were communists. McCarthy was famous for having "lists" of communists in various government departments and areas of public life.


3. Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, a proposal by the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s to enlist U.S. workers such as cable installers, home repair technicians, and U.S. Postal Service carriers to report suspicious activities in and around the homes of private citizens.

Now we have the fourth effort. The current U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, has provided a brief outline of what the Trump administration says it is doing to implement the president's National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7. The supposed targets of the effort are "Antifa and Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremist groups." (Antifa is short for anti-fascist.)*

I'm reminded of a scene in the film "Stranger than Fiction" in which an IRS agent asks a bakery owner whom he is auditing whether she is a member of an anarchist group. He asks this because she has explained to him that she refuses to pay the portion of her taxes that represent military expenditures. Here's how the exchange goes:

Anna Pascal (Bakery Owner):  I think, actually I sent a letter to that effect with my return.

Harold Crick (IRS Agent):  Would it be the letter that begins,"Dear lmperialist Swine"?

Pascal:  Yes.

Crick:  Ms. Pascal, what you're describing is anarchy. Are you an anarchist?

Pascal:  You mean am I a member of--

Crick:  An anarchist group, yes.

Pascal:  Anarchists have a group?

Crick:  I believe so. Sure.

Pascal:  They assemble?

Crick:  I don't know.

Pascal:  Wouldn't that completely defeat the purpose?

I note this exchange because Bondi's memo seems like life imitating art. There appears to be no group called Antifa with an address and a board of directors. It's merely a term used by some activists and by the media to describe disparate actions by a small number of loosely organized people in various locales protesting the Trump regime.

Given the ideological predilections of the Republican Party one would think its members would be favorably predisposed to the philosophy of anarchism which according to the Encyclopedia Britannica is "centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary." I seem to recall that Ronald Reagan, a long-revered Republican president, said: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." But now that the Republican party has total control of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court, its members have renewed faith in the utility of government and its ability to shape American society.

But we have further guidance from Bondi on what to be on the lookout for: "adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity" and "hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality." Nowhere are these terms defined though President Trump has helpfully told us that the administration doesn't like so-called "liberals" and "liberal groups."

Still, there is no attempt to demonstrate how merely holding and espousing such (as yet undefined) views causes one to become dangerous. It is apparently left up to members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (which is composed of federal, state and local law enforcement officers) to figure out what these terms mean and to target people for investigation accordingly.

Now, here is where you come in. You as a citizen can actually earn money by informing on your friends, family members, neighbors and co-workers. According to Bondi's memo: "[B]ecause information from within an organization is often necessary to effectively dismantle large, criminal enterprises, the FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations that conspire with others to commit violations of the provisions of law." (By "domestic terrorist organizations" I'm assuming she means charitable foundations run by people the president doesn't like.)

For those with a more philanthropic turn of mind, there is also the Federal Bureau of Investigation tip line where you can leave information about anyone voicing (or writing down) anti-American, anti-capitalism and/or anti-Christianity ravings. You will, however, not be paid for doing so.

Returning to America in the early part of the 20th century, the first Red Scare produced a number of contradictory court rulings, some upholding convictions based on espousing one's beliefs and others ruling that Americans do indeed have free speech. Perhaps the most famous person to be imprisoned for exercising his First Amendment rights at the time was labor leader and Socialist Party candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs. Debs ran for president for his fifth and final time in 1920 while imprisoned for making a speech in 1918 against American involvement in the First World War. He received nearly 1 million votes (about 3.4 percent of the total vote). President Warren Harding subsequently commuted Debs' 10-year sentence and he was released in 1921.

The McCarthy Era came to an end after McCarthy was publicly excoriated on national television by Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. Army defending a colleague after that colleague was attacked by McCarthy as a communist. The most well-known section of Welch's response to McCarthy was: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

After the exchange, McCarthy's support disappeared. He was censured by the Senate in December 1954. McCarthy finished his term in 1957 and died shortly thereafter at age 48.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration proposed Operation TIPS. So unpopular was the idea of using service workers who install cable, repair household appliances and deliver the mail as spies for the government that Democrats and Republicans alike condemned the program. Reason, a libertarian magazine, wrote a piece about the program entitled "An American Stasi," a reference to the dreaded East German secret police famous for using a vast network of citizen spies. Operation TIPS never got off the ground.

It is one thing for the government to spy on its citizens. We Americans have come to expect that and yet abhor it and even try to roll it back through the courts and through the legislature. But it is quite another to turn neighbor against neighbor, to make refrigerator repairmen into agents of the police state, to create suspicion that fellow employees might be spies for a government that wants to curb your free speech and investigate you for it.

There is a kind of fascism that wants to force its citizens to be good fascists using the power of the government. There is another kind, even worse, that attempts to use average citizens to report on whether their neighbors are being good fascists. It is my experience that Americans hate tattletales and informers. It is therefore my hope that they will reject this latest attempt to enlist them in this freedom-killing exercise currently being pressed by the Trump administration and its (In)Justice Department.

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*It's difficult to see how being against fascism is somehow "un-American" as mentioned later. But it may be more relevant that self-identified Antifa activists believe that the Trump administration is fascist and therefore acting contrary to American values.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.