By Jim Redden
Published by Feral House, Venice, CA 2001, 235 pages
Reviewed by Hans
Sherrer
Appeared in
Justice Denied Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 5
Snitch
Culture is a timely
examination of how personal and technological snitching is used by the state
and private organizations, in conjunction with informational databases, to
obliterate the privacy of Americans. The author, Jim Redden, formerly
published PDXS, a quasi-counterculture newspaper in Portland, Oregon.
Judas Iscariot is the most well known snitch
in history. Mr. Redden relates in considerable detail how the state in
general, and its law enforcement network in particular, is dependent on large
numbers of people emulating Judas' example of snitching on Jesus Christ for 30
pieces of silver. They are also duly rewarded with enticements that can
include a reduced sentence, dropped charges, informant payments and deflecting
their guilt on to others.
The state's addiction to snitches is
illustrated by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1999 to let stand a lower
court ruling in U.S. v. Singleton, that federal prosecutors are exempt
from the federal statute prohibiting the bribery of witnesses to testify
favorably for the government.
The book also relates horror stories of
innocent people who have been victimized by snitches unconcerned with the
truth. Their ordeals emphasize that everyone is endangered by the state's
unrestrained purchase and reliance on questionable information from suspect
sources.
Furthermore, when the state is unable to
acquire information directly, it has long relied on the intelligence network
of snitches working with private organizations, such as the Anti Defamation
League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Mr. Redden points out that children are
taught to snitch on each other and their parents by programs such as DARE,
employees are encouraged to snitch on coworkers and their employers, lawyers
snitch on clients, acquaintances and spouses snitch on each other, ad nauseam.
Snitching is so epidemic in this country that it is becoming culturally
ingrained.
For anyone skeptical of how easily and
quickly "ordinary" people can be induced to become a snitch, Mr. Redden
explains the chilling "Third Wave Experiment" a San Francisco area high school
teacher conducted in 1967. In an April 2000 interview, the teacher recalled
that in few days: "Students were becoming like the Gestapo and giving me
personal information I could use against other students in class."
Mechanical and electronic snitching has a
long history of augmenting personal snitching. Although not mentioned in the
book, at the behest of the federal government a mechanical punch-card computer
was invented in 1884 that aided the collection of information on Americans
beginning with the census of 1890. When later controlled by IBM, that same
technology assisted the German censuses of the 1930's and it eased the
identification and rounding up of Jews and other undesirables. The passage of
the Social Security Act in 1935 and the creation of a data file on most
Americans and every business employing workers, encouraged development of the
electronic computer: the first prototype of which was functional in 1939.
In the 1928 case of Olmstead v. U.S., the
Supreme Court gave its approval to the state's use of electronic snitch
devices to snoop on Americans. In his dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis warned
of the Pandora's Box of privacy invasions the Court was opening. Mr. Redden
explains that just seven decades later, Americans are subjected to pervasive
forms of technological snitching from before their birth until after their
death. Most of that covert surveillance and collection of information is
conducted as a part of the daily routine of state agencies and private
businesses and organizations.
There has been considerable publicity in the
last few years that phone calls, emails, and even faxes of people are secretly
monitored by State agencies, as well as employers who are not constrained by
any 4th Amendment concerns. Although published in March 2001, snitching is
expanding at such a rate that Mr. Redden doesn't mention the
NSA's (National Security Agency) Tempest project
that can read a computer screen from 1/2 mile away, that was written about in
the April 20001 issue of Popular Mechanics. Neither does he mention the
NRO's 25 billion dollar spy satellite project
reported on page one of the LA Times of Mach 18, 2001. Those projects reflect
one of the central themes of Snitch Culture: we often don't know when
or how we are being watched or reported on.
Furthermore, untold thousands of businesses
have improved on Radio Shack's rudimentary collection, beginning over 20 years
ago, of information about its customers. State agencies are increasingly using
information in private databases to fine-tune its own snitch projects. Mr.
Redden also points out the irony that people who publicly express the fear of
losing their rights are specifically targeted for state funded snitch programs
that undermine those very rights.
Jeremy Bentham
didn't apply his concept of the Panoptical prison to the surveillance of an
entire society. However, the U.S. increasingly resembles just such a prison
due to the institutionalization of state and private snitching. Given that
environment, Snitch Culture provides a healthy counterbalance to the
deafening crescendo that technology is "our friend". It is ushering in a brave
new world, but one that has many ugly and disturbing qualities.
It can no longer be ignored that the
technological surveillance portrayed in the chilling 1970 movie, Colossus:
The Forbin Project, and in the book, The Year of Consent by Crossen
(1954), is now more in the realm of possible and even the real, than it is of
science fiction. Along with other science fiction of the 1950's and 60's, they
prophesied that the ability of technological devices to snitch on people would
affect their conduct, and the direction and "feel" of society.
This review only scratches the surface of the
wealth of information in Snitch Culture and the breadth of its
contents. Its last 60 pages, for example, are comprised of 9 case studies
covering aspects of the snitching and surveillance Americans have been and are
continuously being subjected to. A valuable addition to future editions would
be an index and a bibliography that are noticeably absent from the first
edition.
Snitch Culture
is a significant contribution to the growing body of criticism related to
state sponsored and private spying, invasions of privacy, and the law
enforcement networks dependency on closing case files by purchasing tainted
information and testimony. Mr. Redden succeeds in painting a horrific portrait
of the central role snitching has in the surveillance state the U.S. has
become. The book is worth reading by those wanting to increase their awareness
of how their life is, and will continue to be, impacted by state and private
surveillance, intelligence networks and snitching techniques.
Snitch Culture
can be ordered by mail for $18.45 ($14.95 + $3.50 s/h) from:
Feral House P.O. Box 13067 Los Angeles, CA 90013-0067
It can be ordered online from
bn.com (Barnes and Noble),
amazon.com, and other web sites.