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Blasted for plans to link the spy program to "America's Most Wanted," John Ashcroft has tapped another private firm to run its volunteer hotline. His most fervent supporter: Joe Lieberman.
Aug 30, 2002 | Scarcely two weeks after the Justice Department was found to be referring volunteers in its Operation TIPS domestic-spy program to Fox TV's "America's Most Wanted" crime hotline, Attorney General John Ashcroft is making plans to farm out the TIPS hotline to a different private organization.
The Richmond, Va.-based nonprofit company, called the National White Collar Crime Center, confirmed Wednesday that it is discussing plans with the Justice Department to operate a hotline that would take calls from citizens that the department signs up in its planned Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) spy program. Civil libertarians are outraged by the plan to privatize the operation. "It's troubling that the Justice Department would go out of its way to try to get around the Fourth Amendment and the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act this way," says John Whitehead, president of the conservative Rutherford Institute.
Meanwhile, a battle is shaping up in Congress over efforts to block funding for the TIPS program entirely. Last month, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Homeland Security bill with a measure added by Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, that prohibited federal funding for programs that would have American citizens spying on each other. But an effort by Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., to do the same thing with the Senate's version of the bill was stymied by Senate Government Operations Committee Chair Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
Lieberman, according to a member of his staff, is in favor of a limited version of Ashcroft's TIPS program, which would only involve recruiting workers in certain industries -- such as trucking, mass transit and shipping -- as citizen spies. "The senator likes the idea of a program limited to certain types of workers," says one staffer.
Rachel King, a congressional lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, says "Lieberman seems to be in communication with Ashcroft because they're both talking about the same kind of limited program."
Word of the Justice Department's new privatization scheme has civil libertarians, already worried about the premise of TIPS, even more concerned about the program.
"It's clearly an end run around the Freedom of Information Act," says Kit Gage, president of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom and an executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild. "It doesn't resolve any of the concerns that have been expressed about TIPS and instead creates dozens of new ones." She notes that a private hotline not run by the federal government would be free of congressional oversight, and would not need to follow federal guidelines regarding the gathering or holding of personal data. (For example, federal investigators are supposed to avoid interfering with free speech or religious practice.) An additional concern would be the sharing of information with other agencies and organizations.
"The attorney general takes an oath to protect the Constitution and here he is doing the opposite," says the Rutherford Institute's Whitehead.
Significantly, the National White Collar Crime Center is a membership organization composed of state and local law-enforcement agencies, making the wide transfer of information gathered by TIPSters that much easier and more likely. Says Bob Levy of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, "This means instead of one databank, there will be 70 -- or 700."
A spokesperson at the Justice Department responsible for fielding questions about TIPS says concerns about the program are overblown. "We don't have any plans for a database," she said. But asked what the department planned to do with taped calls about "suspicious behavior" reported by TIPS volunteers calling into the hotline, she conceded that she didn't know how the material would be handled. As envisioned by the Justice Department, she explained, the TIPS hotline would operate much like local 911 systems, with operators routing TIPSters' calls to "the most appropriate federal, state or local agency."
Asked to explain how it intended to handle operation of the planned TIPS hotline, and the information it collects on people via that hotline, Ronda Ellcessor, a spokeswoman for the National White Collar Crime Center, said bluntly, "We have no information available for the public."
