Many Americans adopted neighbor surveillance as patriotic duty without government prompting

Evidence

After 9/11 the U.S. government proposed the creation of Operation TIPS—the Terrorist Information and Prevention System program—that encouraged citizens to report suspicious behavior to the government. Operation TIPS was controversial and eventually scrapped; evidence of it has since been deleted from government web pages. Nonetheless, the months after 9/11 made it clear that many individuals did not need the creation of a new government program to take part in a long-standing American tradition; many took it on as their patriotic duty to monitor and report neighbors, coworkers, and strangers who looked like they might be Arab or Muslim or South Asian or Middle Eastern. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 468

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s work on institutions and reputation — here surveillance as informal social enforcement replaces institutional programs.
• QUESTION: The claim that Operation TIPS evidence was deleted from government web pages is intriguing — worth verifying how thoroughly it was scrubbed.