THE TV IS WATCHING

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then the war on terrorism has made some that are even stranger. A recent story in the online magazine Salon.com detailed what happened when a reporter stumbled on an apparent (albeit brief) alliance between the U.S. Justice Department and….the Fox TV network!?

It all came to light when a Salon writer from Philadelphia by the name of Dave Lindorff tried to sign up for the Justice Department’s proposed TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) network. TIPS, in case you hadn’t heard, was one of the brainchildren of Attorney General John Ashcroft. It proposed, in the TIPS Website, a "national system for reporting suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity." The system would be made up of "millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places." People like postmen, meter readers, cable installers, and, I suppose Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. You know, the type of people who are always going door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood. If they noticed swarthy people doing suspicious things, like lighting their shoes on fire, storing large amounts of anthrax spores in their garages, or speaking in strange foreign tongues, the TIPSters could alert the proper authorities, and, perhaps, foil another major terrorist attack. Or so the theory ran.

There was only one problem with the idea. Americans hated it. Liberals hated it. Conservatives hated it. The NRA hated it. The ACLU really hated it. Even the Postal Service refused to sign on. So did UPS and Fed Ex. See what I mean about strange bedfellows?

So The Justice Department backed off, although the idea has not yet been declared completely dead. Some lawmakers, particularly Senator Joe "Man O’God" Lieberman actually kind of like the idea of a corps of citizen informants. That, for me was enough to kill the idea right then and there. I swear, every time Holy Joe opens his mouth to proclaim another move towards an all encompassing Nanny state, I feel a little better that the Gore-Lieberman ticket lost. Glad, that is, until I see who actually won. Then I have to go lie down.

Anyway, the TIPS program was down but not out. It was still taking applications for volunteers. So Dave Lindorff (remember him?) thought it might be instructional to join up as a volunteer. He went to the Website, filled out an application, and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, he realized that all of this waiting would be a dull article even for an online magazine. He called the toll-free number for the TIPS program—and got the switchboard for "America’s Most Wanted." Seems that the FBI, which apparently contains more than a few "AMW" fans, had enlisted the aid of the show and its star and creator, John Walsh, to handle the tips to TIPS until the program got off the ground.

Now, I have to say, I’m not totally sure whether to believe this account. Even though Salon.com has aspirations to serious journalism, we are, after all, talking about the Internet.

But it does have a certain weird logic to it. After all, Fox, which shows "AMW", has been one of the chief outlets so-called "reality TV." The proliferation of people with home video rigs, ubiquitous "live-action news" teams, store surveillance cameras, traffic cams, web-cams, you name it, has made us the most watched and taped society on the planet. It’s made possible shows like "Busted on the Job: Caught On Tape", "Scariest Police Chases" and of course "When Animals Attack!" In the past few years, TV has started watching us as much as we’re watching it. So when the government wants us to keep an eye on one another, why not turn to the network that’s one of the leaders in that field?

Let’s just hope that we can avoid a repetition of that time in which an alert "AMW" viewer, having seen a graphic re-enactment of a crime on the show, provided information that led the police to make an arrest. Unfortunately, the man the viewer had tagged as the bad guy was actually just the actor who played in the re-enactment. It’s a problem with this sort of thing: while most of us aspire to be like Sheriff Andy, there are an awful lot more Barney Fifes.

There’s also a real possibility a system like TIPS could be abused. I’m not saying that you or I would get rid of, say, a particularly persistent telemarketer by calling TIPS and reporting that "Bob from the Friends and Family Program called me up and tried to recruit me into Al-Quaeda." But I’ll admit, it would be a temptation.

TIPS is one of those idea that sounded great on September 12, 2001. But in 2002, when it got down to actually implementing it, things got a little sticky, and, as we see above, a little ridiculous.

Here’s the thing: Americans may enjoy watching their fellow Americans, but they hate the idea of someone else watching them. Especially if that person is working for the guvmint, even on a freelance basis.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.