Suspicious Minds: The New American Way

Mother Davis peeps through the blinds with suspicion as she muses,

Those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War with some clarity will recall that one of the things we were all told was really terrible about living in the Soviet Union was that you couldn’t go anywhere without being watched. The Soviets had worked out a nasty system in which neighbors spied on neighbors, and reported any suspicious behavior to the authorities in the Kremlin. It would be awful to live under the prying eyes of such a government, we were told. We were lucky that no one would ever do such a thing in America, the land of the free.

Well, times have changed. This morning, I learned about an Air Force program that reminds me of the old Soviet system of neighbors spying on neighbors. It’s called the Eagle Eyes Program. Who’s supposed to have the eagle eyes? That’s right – it’s you.

The Eagle Eyes program has set up local telephone numbers across America, so that Americans can inform on their neighors’ “suspicious activity” without even bothering to work up a long distance telephone charge. The local reports are then funnelled automatically to the Kremlin, I mean Pentagon, where they are entered into a gigantic database that the military keeps in a top secret room, in computers full of records of the “suspicious” activities of American citizens.

The Eagle Eyes reporting system is operational 24 hours a day, so that people can peek through the hedges and make reports on people in their communities even in the dead of night. That way, you never know when someone might be watching you.

In this Air Force citizen informant system, you can never be sure who is watching you, either. The Eagle Eyes system even solicits snooping by little children – encouraging entire American families to become government informants.

What kind of “suspicious activity” does the Eagle Eyes citizen spying program tell its participants to be on the lookout for? Well, imminent terrorist attacks are, of course, on the watch list. There are other items in the Eagle Eyes description of “suspicious activities that warrant reporting”. Among these is the observation of a “people who don’t seem to belong” in a particular neighborhood.

When did it become the business of the government when American citizens visit neighborhoods where they “don’t seem to belong”? Are white suburbanites supposed to make government reports when black people show up in their neighborhoods? What about when working class people show up in an upper middle class shopping district? Is that a threat to the Homeland as well? How about an anti-war demonstration that marches past the watchful gaze of an Eagle Eye recruit? Under the Eagle Eyes neighborhood espionage program, the military is asking citizens to become government informants to report on these kinds of lawful, peaceful activities. In this new system, stepping out of line and defying the expectations of the conservative society makes one a terrorist suspect.

Eagle Eyes is a relatively new program, less than one year old, but it hasn’t gotten very much attention. It was introduced last year just as the Presidential election grabbed most people’s attention, and it slipped into our daily lives without being widely reported in the press. It’s telling that I myself only found out about the program this morning.

The Bush Administration had tried to implement a similar program a couple of years before, known as Operation TIPS, but public attention forced the Republicans in government to abandon that particular neighborhood civilian spying program. Indeed, most of the elements of the Total Information Awareness system are still in place today, but under a different name. The Bush Administration seems to have learned that it can get away with spying on and keeping records about American citizens’ lawful activities, so long as it does so without letting the press get wind of the activities. When one domestic surveillance program is exposed, it is officially dismantled while its operations are merely shifted over to another office, under another name.

As it is, the John Kerry campaign didn’t even try to talk about government programs to spy on American citizens and collect information about them. It simply never was brought up as a campaign issue. So, the Bush Administration has been given a free pass to develop and implement its programs to watch what we do in our everyday lives.

The issues at stake could not be more vital. It isn’t just a matter of privacy, or the integrity of the constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure. The Eagle Eyes program unlawfully blends the military intelligence activities of the Air Force with what ought to be domestic law enforcement. So, the Air Force watches all of us as if we are all potential “enemy combatants” – a frightening thought given the Bush Administration’s willingness to take even American citizens into indefinite imprisonment without trial or access to lawyers. It’s plainly against the law for the military to take over domestic law enforcement duties, but that’s what’s happening as part of a larger trend of increasing military power over civilian life.

Programs that encourage neighbors to spy on one another also degrade the trust that serves as the foundation of healthy American neighborhoods. When the government recruits Americans to make reports on the people in their communities, it breaks down the structures that make our society work. It makes people afraid to say or do anything out of fear that what they say and what they do might go into some kind of government file that is being kept on them. Freedom and democracy cannot survive long under such conditions.

That’s what the KGB was counting on. The persistence of the Bush Administration in developing and implementing programs of this sort make me worry that the people in the White House have something similar in mind.

The motto of the Eagle Eyes program is “Watch. Report. Protect.” The funny thing is, with my neighbors watching me and informing on me to the government, I don’t feel very well protected at all.

Searching her garage for a hammer and a sickle,
Mother Davis