The TIPS program has been under fire almost since it was first announced in January as part of President Bush's "volunteerism initiative" in his State of the Union address. As originally proposed, the program hoped to enlist over 20 million citizen spies who would report on the suspicious behavior of their neighbors. That plan, and a 10-city test involving some 1 million citizen spies set for this month, was scrapped after critics said it resembled the kind of neighborhood spying that for years permeated East Germany and China.

A chastened Ashcroft responded to the criticism by proposing a much more limited TIPS program.

Those independent citizens who had volunteered to join the TIPS program were sent e-mail messages earlier this month by the department saying that they were no longer needed and that the planned hotline number would only be provided "through their employers" to workers in the selected industries. "Unlike other Citizen Corps programs, which invite the participation of the general public, only those who work in the trucking, maritime, shipping, and mass transit industries will be eligible to participate in this information referral service," the mass mailing to TIPS volunteers stated. "General information about the program will continue to be available to the public; however, the TIPS hotline number will only be provided to participating industries."

Even this more limited TIPS plan has critics worried, however, especially because Lieberman has indicated that he supports the Justice Department's more limited plan. Lieberman ignored a request by Leahy to include a measure similar to Armey's in the Senate's version of the Homeland Security Bill, which is being handled by Lieberman's Government Affairs Committee, saying it had been presented to the committee "too late" for consideration.

Leahy intends to introduce his amendment, which would ban funding for tips TIPS altogether, when the bill goes to a vote after the Senate's summer recess. Congressional observers say its prospects for passage are 50-50 at best.

A Leahy spokesman said that reports of the new privatized hotline plan "will raise new questions in the Senate and House while leaving unanswered all the earlier ones about how tip information will be shared and stored."

Leahy has been critical of the Justice Department, saying Ashcroft has been stonewalling Congress in its efforts to learn more about the government's plans for Operation TIPS. "As Congress has moved toward dismantling the program, the Justice Department's response has been not to work systematically with Congress to address concerns about the program," the senator told Salon. "The administration's response has been to backpedal to try to change the program's image. The Senate hearing on this was more than a month ago and we still do not have answers to even basic questions about who would have access to these files and how they would be stored, shared and processed. In the meantime, the FBI and other agencies already receive more information than they have figured out how to handle."

King, the ACLU lobbyist, predicts that Leahy's amendment banning funding for TIPS will have tough sledding in the Senate. "Sen. Lieberman is against it," she explains. She says the best chance for banning TIPS lies in a future Senate-House conference to reconcile the two houses' versions of the Homeland Security Bill. Armey, who is not running for reelection, has vowed to make sure his ban survives that conference. The key question will be how strong Lieberman's support is for Ashcroft's citizen spy scheme.

A major concern about TIPS among civil libertarians is that it would encourage ordinary citizens to snoop on neighbors in ways that legitimate law-enforcement personnel are barred from doing. "For example," says the Rutherford Institute's Whitehead, "a meter reader or a truck driver making a delivery could come into my house and report on me because he saw a book by Nat Hentoff on my shelf. He wouldn't need a warrant to come into my house the way an FBI agent would."

"Of course you need to collect information, and make sure everyone understands their responsibility concerning terrorist threats," says the National Lawyers Guild's Gage. "But this 'Operation Snitch' of Ashcroft's is something very different from that. By its very nature, Operation TIPS is likely to focus on collection of First-Amendment-protected kinds of information: some foreign-looking people criticizing the government, or some dark-skinned people practicing a strange religious rite."

If the TIPS program does get Congress' blessing, it will face a fierce battle in the courts. "Whether by law or by litigation, this end run around the mandate for openness and accountability by the Justice Department cannot be permitted," says New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman (no relation). "It's a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the law for the Justice Department to seek to avoid accountability by farming the program out to private entities."

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