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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Volunteers for Operation TIPS, John Ashcroft's citizen spy army, are being steered to the Fox crime show "America's Most Wanted." Is the merger of tabloid TV with the federal snooping operation funny or scary or both?
Aug 6, 2002 | When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the formation of Operation TIPS, a planned army of tens of millions of American volunteers charged with ferreting out terrorists in their neighborhoods, plenty of pundits questioned whether Americans spying on Americans was a good thing. Very few people asked exactly how it would work, and the Justice Department didn't offer any clues.
To find out, I went to the Citizen Corps Web site, then to the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) page, and signed up as a volunteer. I quickly discovered that TIPS is having a devilish time getting off the ground. After an initial welcome from the Justice Department, I heard nothing for a month. When I finally called two weeks ago to ask what citizens were supposed to do if they had a terror tip, I was given a phone number I was told had been set up by the FBI.
But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."
Has Ashcroft turned his embattled volunteer citizen spy program -- which has been blasted by left and right alike -- over to Fox Broadcasting's "America's Most Wanted"? If so, the connection shouldn't be all that surprising. Ashcroft's Justice Department and John Walsh's popular crime-busters show have been a mutual-admiration society for some time now. Walsh started coaxing ratings out of the 9/11 disaster for Fox TV while the dust was still settling from the twin towers' collapse. Only two days after the attack, Walsh loaded his whole production team onto a bus in Indiana and drove the show to ground zero, where, he claimed, government officials had told him to "help us catch these bastards."
But it's still hard to nail down the exact nature of the relationship between TIPS and "America's Most Wanted." Officials at the Justice Department and Fox Television denied reports of a formal link -- even though their switchboard operators last week were working happily in concert. "TIPS doesn't exist yet," said Linda Monsour, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's Office of Justice Programs, which will oversee Operation TIPS if it gets going this fall as planned. Then Monsour conceded that the Justice Department, which has an $8 million start-up budget for TIPS, had already begun signing up individual volunteers, in advance of the program's ratification by Congress. She wasn't exactly sure how those calls were being handled. But she denied knowing anything about a hotline to the Fox show. "It's probably something I should explore," she said.
"America's Most Wanted" publicist Kim Newport also denied knowing about a formal link between the Justice Department and the TIPS program when interviewed last Friday, but she did acknowledge that the show regularly takes tips from callers about possible terror threats. "We have been taking calls on terrorism," she said. Noting that TIPS is not officially running yet, she mused, "Maybe the Justice Department just turned to us because that's how our program works." Newport says the show turns over all of its terrorism tip calls to the FBI, or to the Postal Inspector's Office if they relate to anthrax threats.
Clearly, someone in the Justice Department decided to enlist the show in processing TIPS calls, and civil libertarians aren't sure whether the Fox-TIPS synergy is funny or scary or both. "On a certain level, it's laughable -- a Keystone Kops kind of thing," says Bill Goodman, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "But the frightening thing about it is, what if someone actually did find evidence of a real terrorist ring, and they brought it to a TV station instead of the FBI?"
"This is really, really bad judgment on the part of the administration," says Rachel King, lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, who was "stunned" when I told her TIPS calls were being directed to the Fox show.
"TIPS was supposed to be about reporting suspicious behavior, which would then be interpreted by the FBI or local law enforcement. Now it turns out the information is being handed to a TV program that encourages vigilantism. What will 'America's Most Wanted' do with the information? It's kind of mind-blowing. It was bad enough when the reports were going to be filed with the Justice Department or the FBI. With this information in private hands, who's going to protect people from malicious complaints?"
A spokeswoman for Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., whose Governmental Affairs Committee is handling the Senate's version of the Homeland Security bill that would include TIPS, said, "It's inappropriate for a TV program to be taking these kinds of calls. That is certainly not what Sen. Lieberman has in mind."
Observers on all sides of the debate are still trying to figure out what Ashcroft has in mind.
