Ashcroft vs. Americans

OPERATION 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.