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.

If Ashcroft wishes to assess the likely effect of the snooping
regime he is about to implement, he could ask postal workers from
the old days in Prague to explain what happens to a society's
sense of solidarity when everybody on the block assumes that the
mailman is telling the secret police that Comrade X has been
reading bourgeois books.

For a bit of the shock therapy Ashcroft and his fellow travelers
seem to need, they ought to consult some of the citizens in the
former East Germany who discovered, when looking into their Stasi
files, that under the former regime they had been spied upon for
years by a husband or wife.

Ashcroft's informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it
violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense or because it
will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism by overloading
law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about Americans
who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPS should be
stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would give Stalin
and the KGB a delayed triumph in the Cold War - in the name of the
Bush administration's war against terrorism.

(This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on 7/17/2002.)
(c) Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.