Informant nation.

In East Germany, they were called spitzels; in Soviet Russia, stukachi; in Communist Cuba, chivatos. Every unfortunate society saddled with a police state has scornfully labeled the citizen informants who play the most important role in enforcing conformity to the ruling elite's will. In the emerging post-9/l1 garrison state in America, a New Jersey-based pilot program would create a cadre of citizen-informants called "CAT Eyes."

Co-created by retired Air Force officer Mike Licata, ex-military SWAT officer Jason McClendon, and businessman Tony Elghossain, the Community Anti-Terrorism Training Institute is "an antiterrorist citizen informant program being adopted by local police departments throughout the East Coast and parts of the Midwest," reported the May 7th Boston Globe. The program's motto is a near-plagiarism of Orwell: "Watching America with Pride, Not Prejudice."

Licata explains that CAT Eyes is intended to be "a modern civil defense network" converting local neighborhood watch groups into an anti-terrorist surveillance network. Local CAT Eyes affiliates, "constantly watching for signs of terrorist activity in their neighborhoods and workplaces, would report suspicious activities directly to the FBI," reports the Globe. States Licata: "I envision 100 million Americans looking for indicators of terrorism and promptly reporting it to a central database where it would get analyzed."

Keeping one's neighbors under scrutiny is simply one's "patriotic" duty, according to Licata -- and only the guilty need fear. "If I felt that my neighbor of 10 years was doing fund-raising for a [terrorist] group, I'd turn 'em in," he insists. "[The FBI will] just investigate them -- and if you're wrong, you're wrong. And if you're right, that's a big thing!"

If the program comes anywhere near its goal of 100 million informants, it "would dwarf the citizen informer programs of the most repressive totalitarian states, making them appear amateurish by comparison," points out the Globe. The previous record-holder was the informant program operated by Communist East Germany's Stasi secret police, in which about one-eighth of the population enlisted as spitzels. Licata's program would sign up one of every three Americans to serve as CAT Eyes.