Keeping America safe from totalitarian ideologues is a big, big job, too big in fact for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the entire Department of Justice to handle on their own. The DOJ commands a $27.7 billion annual budget, and the FBI employs 35,629 full-time foes of evil. Their business is to protect the United States from bad people. Those bad people might be 15-year-old computer punks; they might be sophisticated zealots who hate America’s freedoms with such vehemence that they want to blow us all up. And the bad people just might win, according to our country’s law-enforcement elite, unless we, the American public, help.
The FBI and DOJ have launched the “Communities Against Terrorism” program. The campaign seeks assistance from workers in 25 industries to spy on their fellow citizens ferret out the terrorists among us. Citizen spies are being recruited from hotel and motel personnel, dive shop operators, car and property rental agents, the inky patriots who run tattoo parlors, gun dealers and baristas at Internet cafes.
Obviously, an invective-mumbling individual “refusing to complete appropriate paperwork” while paying cash to buy large quantities of explosives and asking for driving directions on a map that has skulls-and-crossbones marked across every Mall of the America emergency exit has raised a red flag. Report this person to the appropriate authorities.
If you visit an airport, stay in a hotel, drink coffee at an Internet café, or in some other way interact with one of the Halloween G-men in the American public, a full-fledged FBI investigation is only one phone call away.
The Communities Against Terrorism directives go further, warning some on the American labor force, such as Airport Service Providers, to monitor even their coworkers for suspicious behavior. But when the FBI’s “Suspicious Activity Reporting” forms are distributed to all potential spies on a given airport food court, any terrorist manning an espresso machine is given a heads-up.
