[MAT 10:36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

DEU 28:43 The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.

Ed. Note: Tom Ridge has some good ideas for America, or at least Hitler would have liked them. Not only does he want more technology to track you, but now he is asking your neighbor to help him watch you. Did I say you? No, No, I meant the bad guys - or at least those who are bad guys according to their definition. My question is what and who determines a bad guy? Right now, so far a Christian is on the good guy list, what happens when his name moves to the bad guy list simply because he won’t deny Jesus or break God’s law?]

(2) "One of the current Administration’s ‘anti-terror’ initiatives is slowly taking shape, and it isn’t a pretty sight. TIPS, Terrorism Information and Prevention System (www.CitizenCorps.gov/tips.html), is a government plan for recruiting millions of Americans to spy and snitch on their neighbors. The recruitment focuses on people with access to homes and businesses, including letter carriers and utility employees.

According to Ritt Goldstein, who broke the news, the Justice Department plans that ‘the U.S. will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police.’ One in every 24 Americans will be a snitch, which means that, assuming your acquaintance list is 150 names long, you will know six rats personally.

In public schools, students are invited to place anonymous calls and rat on other students, while teachers and counselors are encouraged to report ‘anti-social’ tendencies to the police. At work, employers require workers to report on other workers, hire detectives to spy on workers and question neighbors on workers’ private lives. Neighbors are asked to call the police if they suspect someone’s child is crying too much. Hospital workers are asked to inform the police about the drug habits of patients. The IRS wants to know what you think of your neighbor’s new Lexus, etc.

Snitches and informants are usually associated with authoritarian, and often totalitarian regimes. The infamous Stasi police in East Germany has won notoriety for their extensive snitch files. Other brutal regimes invest in large secret police forces that specialize in recruiting and handling informants. The regimes of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all rely extensively on such methods.

Snitching creates a culture of paranoia. It isolates people, breaks down social solidarity, and prevents exchange of information between members of society.

Everyone becomes obsessed with watching their own back. Nobody is a friend. Nobody can be trusted.

Many people, after reading the official Citizen Corp web page, will say that TIPS is really no big deal. After all, what can be so wrong about citizens notifying the government about what looks to them as terrorist related activity—thanks to 911?

A lot, actually. People don’t know what terror activity looks like. To the casual eye, preparing for a terror attack can look like just about anything. Professional terrorists don’t look like professional terrorists. They look like me and you.

Informants will report instead on whatever fits their prejudices —odd haircuts, books in Arabic, posters of Che Guevara, disparaging comments about the intelligence of the President, etc. Some of them will invent stories to harm people because they hold a grudge against them. Others will use their imagination to make themselves loved by their handlers.

TIPS will create new governmental files on citizens, useful for harassment and abuse, and not much else. It will increase the paranoia and suspiciousness of American society, driving it one step closer to George Orwell’s dystopia. That is a high price to pay for pretending to increase our safety. It is a suicidal response to the terrorist suicide attack on September 11.

If TIPS doesn’t seem outrageous, it is because Americans have already accepted a significant degree of totalitarianism and the decline of civil society that is totalitarianism’s essential counterpart.

On July 16, 2002, after information on TIPS began attracting media attention, the content of the page changed."