EA's Canuckistan in The Guardian: State-sanctioned Snitching

Canuckistan, aka Steve Hewitt, has become the second Enduring America in the past few days to be featured in The Guardian's Comment Is Free with this piece on how the UK government is encouraging its citizens to become stake-holders in counter-terrorism. If you weren't feeling inspired about Bruce Schneier's contest, this might help:

State-sanctioned snitching

The UK's new counter-terrorism strategy of neighbour spying on neighbour echoes proposals that caused outrage in the US

Steve Hewitt

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

With much fanfare, the government of Gordon Brown unveiled Contest 2, its sequel to the UK's previous counter-terrorism strategy. In the lead-up to its emergence, bits of the programme were leaked to the media, including that approximately 60,000 people such as security guards and shop clerks would receive training on what to watch for in terms of suspicious behaviour and how to react in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

That aspect of the strategy was preceded by a new anti-terrorist campaign launched by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Metropolitan police involving advertisements appearing at tube stations, on billboards in London and elsewhere, and even on the radio. These ads raise the spectre of terrorism and the reward for action by diligent citizens who in the tube and billboard ads notice suspicious behaviour, such as chemical containers in a skip or an individual studying CCTV cameras, and report the incidents via a confidential anti-terrorism hotline. The radio commercial provides the alternative to citizens failing to act with the sound of a devastating explosion.

In a UK context these campaigns represent an effort to widen public participation in counter-terrorism, essentially turning citizens into stakeholders in the effort. They also reflect a continued government concern about the risk of terrorism, particularly through low-level attacks carried out by so-called "self starters" who exist outside those groups and individuals already known to the police and security service.

Encouraging suspicion through counter-terrorism training of ordinary citizens or public advertising campaigns is not, however, without its own risks. There is the potential for certain citizens to be demonised and stigmatised when their activities receive excessive scrutiny and, through calls to the hotline, to unwarranted attention from the police. Indeed, this point plus the wider implications for civil liberties of state-sanctioned snitching were the issues that emerged when a similar effort was proposed in the US in 2002.

In January 2002, the Bush administration introduced the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Tips) with the goal of increasing public participation in domestic counter-terrorism. The goal of Tips was to "enable millions of America transportation workers, postal workers, and public utility employees to identify and report suspicious activities linked to terrorism and crime". It was to do so by setting up a special hotline, similar to the one in the British advertising, that these workers could call to report suspicious behaviour. The US deputy attorney general hailed the programme as providing "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others, whose routines allow them to be the 'eyes and ears' of police, a formal way to report suspicious or potential terrorist activity".

The programme largely escaped wider public attention until a story in an Australian newspaper compared it to something that could have emerged from the former German Democratic Republic. Very quickly a maelstrom of criticism erupted that ran across the American political spectrum from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Village Voice on the left to the New York Times in the centre to Republican congressmen Dick Armey and Bob Barr on the right, the latter who called it a "snitch system", that appeared to typify "the very type of fascist or communist government we fought so hard to eradicate in other countries in decades past". The New York Times ran interviews with some workers who potentially might be called upon to report information. A delivery driver remarked on the increased number of satellite dishes he had delivered to "Arabs" after 11 September while another driver complained that "[i]mmigrants stare more than anybody else". In an editorial the paper decried the new version of the programme: "Even if it is limited to public places, the programme is offensive. The idea of citizens spying on citizens, and the government collecting data on everyone who is accused, is a staple of totalitarian regimes."

By then, Tips had made a host of enemies, including Armey, the then Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives. With little fanfare, Armey inserted a clause into the Homeland Security Act that prohibited any efforts to implement Tips. The programme died when Bush signed the act into law in November 2002.

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

Comments

[Josh Mull]

I have a problem with the characterization of the political battle around TIPS here in the US. At the time (the run up to the November 2002 elections) there was massive outcry from the Democratic party as well as a host of activist and lobbying groups about the Patriot Act and the (then upcoming) Patriot Act II and Homeland Security Act. And even relative to the post 9/11 culture, it could still be considered "massive" as this was pre-Iraq, when "radical, anti-American terrorists" like Bill Maher and Phil Donahue were still allowed access to the corporate bandwidth. This was supposed to be bad news for the Republicans in the 2002 midterms.

In response, the right wing, under the direction of Karl Rove, went against a few choice pieces of legislation, such as TIPS and racial profiling, in an attempt to make the Republicans appear as the "sensible moderates" to the "weak, anti-American, pro-terrorists" in the Democratic party. They did this by playing to partisan double standards, such as Republicans appearing as freedom fighters when they warn of "Weimar Republics" while Democrats are just being histrionic and radical, or only Republicans can complain of inherent racism in things like racial profiling since Democrats are always calling people racists anyway only to win elections.

It's actually pretty definitive of the "Karl Rove playbook," the signature tactic of which is attacking people where they are strongest. If your opponent is strong with women and teacher constituencies, call him a child molester. If your opponent is strong on issues of poverty, hire a bunch of homeless people to show up at their campaign headquarters asking for free food (so we get some nice photos of them being turned away by police!). And if your opponent has more sensible ideas about how to deal with terrorism, you guessed it, call him Pro-Terrorist. And yes, all of these things actually happened.

And the sickest thing is even though the Republicans opposed them to get votes, we still kept those policies. Only instead of being institutionally codified in a way accessible to the democratic system, they were left to rot in unspoken form in the consciousness of citizens. Americans were still able to snitch on each other through a wide variety of programs, both public and private, not to mention that whole illegal wiretapping and suspension of constitutional rights thing they had/have going on. And while there are several layers of laws and legal precedents outlawing racial profiling, that didn't stop security services from harassing everyone with a suntan and 5 o'clock shadow as if they came straight from the militant training camps in Quetta. They were stopping, searching, and intimidating anyone remotely foreign looking, along with other such engines of mass political violence as infants, toddlers and the physically and mentally handicapped. (Meanwhile if some former Blackwater employee geeking off PTSD needs to store his .50 caliber sniper rifle in the overhead compartment, well, rules are made to be bent, right?)

The point of this is to say that not only is looking to American law enforcement as some sort of beacon of enlightened, democratic values a highly dubious proposition in and of itself, but looking to Post 9/11 2002 Republican political maneuvering for that is absolute lunacy. Assuming your audience is remotely politically aware, you'll do far more damage to your position than you can ever hope to help it.

If I was a proponent of these snitch policies, I'd simply ask you to explain what other positions of Dick Armey and Bob Barr you agree with. I'd invite you to any opportunity you want to tell me what other parts of George W Bush's Homeland Security Act you like. Maybe instead of public participation in anti-terrorism measures, you'd like secret prisons and illegal wiretaps? Probably not, but too late, I said it and now you have to defend yourself. See how this works?

You made the mistake of thinking that counter-terrorism policies are created and implemented by reasonable, informed professionals, instead of craven, calculating politicians. From my own admittedly cynical and limited participation in the American political process, I can assure you that the correct tactic for rebuking your snitch programs is organized, focused democratic and legal pressure, not scathing editorials comparing them to Nazis and Stalinists. And at all cost, avoid comparing your arguments to the Bush-Cheney-Rove Post 9/11 "Permanent" Republican majority. Yes, Adolf Hitler created the Volkswagen, but there's a reason they don't tell you that in the Jetta commercials. That old "broken clock is right twice a day" argument is a TRAP, and you fell right into it.

[Mike Dunn]

Apologies all, looks like I left the last paragraph off of the bottom of Steve's essay- I've now added it.