Snitch Culture: How Citizens are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State Paperback – 5 Apr 2001

"Snitches get stitches." A simple message, but in a world where you word is sometimes all you have, it's pretty serious. The world that holds rats, stool pigeons, Judas's and informants in contempt has slowly collapsed in upon itself and is now almost non-existent. A world where people are encouraged to turn in family, friends, co-workers and neighbors has taken its place. Jim Redden takes a look at this world, a world that rewards the weakest of all human traits, a world that is right outside your door; maybe even in your own home. That's right, the Big Brother that is watching may be your brother! "Tying an unpopular activity to a popular cause is good propaganda and one of the most effective tools for recruiting new informants and justifying more surveillance programs." Read that again and then ask yourself how the government accomplishes this goal. Give up? Think about the Wars in the US; the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, the War on Terrorism, the general public buys it with a little spin from government and the press. It all tastes so sweet until you look a little deeper and realize that everyone is a casualty of these wars. Friendly fire anyone? Welcome to the world that Jim Redden is living and working in, welcome to the world that we are all living in. In his look at this world, Redden questions the role of the snitch, their fallibility and why their word, which should be suspect at best, is taken as gospel so often. The answer will come as no surprise; money and jail sentences. Redden shows how the D.A.R.E program and other government policies encourage children and family members to turn on each other for the good of the nation. He also exposes how these snitches are paid big bucks and sometimes allowed to commit heinous crimes themselves with no repercussions because they are assisting the government to fry (allegedly) bigger fish. Redden also details how almost everyone is being watched to some extent during their normal everyday life and mostly without their knowledge. The deep and every growing roots of the snitch culture in America are examined and put under a microscope in this book. The author details how the government tries to justify its surveillance of left wing groups and their causes, and how this surveillance has gotten heavier since the WTO and Republican and Democratic conventions of the recent past. One key item that Redden examines is the difference between a whistleblower and a snitch. Karen Silkwood and Frank Serpico where whistleblowers, Sammy the Bull was a snitch. Redden exposes how the whistleblower, usually a person who is exposing true evil, is often left out on a limb by the government while the snitch is allowed to run roughshod. Closing out this book are a series of case studies; case studies that range from the history of anti-crime snitching to the Black Panther party and Italian Mafia families being torn apart. Case studies that show the questionable way in which the government fought crack as well as how they abused forfeiture laws associated with (alleged) crimes. A book like this is filled with information and is not an easy or quick read. It takes some time and thought to get through it. But in the end, if one really reads this book, they will find it an enlightening and unsettling look at the how the tendrils of the state reach out to their lives and the limit their freedom. As with most of the Feral House titles that fall within the expose genre, this one is well footnoted and documented, making the accusations that much more difficult to refute. In a culture where the government would like the masses to believe that "it's all for your own good", this type of documentation and footnoting is a must. With Snitch Culture, Jim Redden, Adam Parfrey and Feral House have delivered another blow to the mainstream press, the government, and how they lie and deceive the people they are supposed to be protecting.

If you were to be told that, at any give moment, any number of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies could break down your front door, arrest and imprison you, seize your property, and even take the lives of you and your loved ones... all because of a tip-off from an unreliable rogue informant who could have picked your name randomly out of a phone book for all anyone knew... how would you feel?
That is the key question Jim Redden poses in his alarming study of the growing "Snitch Culture" that has pervaded the American justice system since the founding of our nation. "Snitch Culture...How Citizens are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State" is an in-depth look at the way various government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, District Attorney, and local police departments routinely employ the services of third-party informants to identify and prosecute those suspected of wrongdoing. The only problem is, most of these informants are they themselves criminals, volunteering information in exchange for reduced prison sentences or, sometimes, financial rewards. The fear of jail time or the lure of riches is often enough to entice the informant to find someone, anyone, to accuse of committing an illegal act - even a complete stranger. These ulterior motives harbored by the ever-increasing population of government-sponsored snitches are enough to challenge the way we dispense criminal justice in the United States.
But it doesn't end there. Oftentimes, private corporations and politically-oriented non-profit organizations (such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center) also employ a large number of informants to serve their internal interests. It is common practice for companies to employ snitches to monitor the performance and conduct of their employees, sometimes outside of work hours. Organizations with strong political agendas, such as the ADL, have been known to turn to informants as sources of information on their opposition. As Redden points out, the use of snitches is nothing new in the public and private sectors of our society. Several chapters in the book are devoted to tracing the evolution of the informant's role in our culture, from its early American roots when industrialists would employ spies to subvert the activities of local labor unions, to the anti-communist McCarthy "witch hunt" hearings of the 1950s, to the use of informants to infiltrate the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s.
And as if all of this wasn't alarming enough, in addition to the use of snitches, the government (not to mention the private sector) has adopted a wide range of methods of keeping citizens under constant surveillance, whether they have been accused of committing a crime or not. Most notable is the vast, multinational information-gathering network known as Echelon. Designed to address the government's concerns that the Internet is the ideal tool for conducting illegal and subversive activities, Echelon was created to filter through virtually every piece of data crossing the Information Superhighway to find anything that might be remotely construed as "harmful" to public interest. National "crises" that we so often see in the headlines, such as the Drug Epidemic, are manufactured by the government to justify the billions of dollars spent each year to monitor our every move. The establishment media, rather than questioning this movement, instead works hand-in-hand with the government to spread the propagandistic message that reporting the activities of our family and neighbors to the authorities is our patriotic duty.
The result is that we are living in an ever-expanding police state where nothing we say or do is shielded from the eyes, ears, and punishing hand of Big Brother. "Snitch Culture" tackles this vital concern from all angles, examining everything from the aforementioned use of snitches and surveillance tactics, to the "Zero Tolerance" polices of public schools, to the government's handling of the WTO protests in Seattle. Part history, part call-to-action, the book is a true eye-opener to the ways in which our civil liberties are continuously compromised by those claiming to protect us. Although Redden clearly harbors a libertarian ideology, he manages to present the information in a factual, objective light (all of his sources are comprehensively cited in the footnotes), often portraying both right-wing and leftist groups as victims of government intrusion and persecution without due process. But most importantly, "Snitch Culture" supports the freedom of the individual to life his/her life and express his/her views without fear of being ratted out by the snitches that lurk in our shadows.

Snitch Culture is a page turner. Maybe the best book I've read this year. Brilliantly researched and well documented, Jim Redden digs deep into the way law enforcement works, and uncovers new insights into the way our society is changing right under our noses. Frightening and thought provoking, Snitch Culture is a must read for anyone interested in issues of corruption, privacy, and criminal justice.

In this book Jim Redden brings to light the long and shameful history of surveillance in the US, mostly fueled by "snitches." The problem is that snitches are more motivated by monetary payoffs and promised reductions in their own sentences, rather than some sense of justice. Many informants turn out to be liars who are taking the authorities for a ride, but that doesn't stop those in power from giving their lies complete credence. This book has numerous horror stories of innocent people being seized, injured, and sometimes killed by the authorities based on flimsy and unproven tips from informants. The most terrifying aspect of this book is that this is not confined to suspicions of criminal activity, but political activity as well. Before you preemptively dismiss this book as liberal whining, there is plenty of evidence of government surveillance of political groups that both the left and right disagree with, through the use of paid informants who most often have a score to settle. The government also gets around the Bill of Rights by subcontracting with private groups who spy on their opponents out of political paranoia (a shocking example of this is the Anti-Defamation League).
These are truly disturbing revelations that Redden admirably brings to light. Unfortunately this book has a severe flaw, in that Redden cannot draw the line between those types of informing that are constructive and non-constructive for society. We should be shocked at political surveillance of people who are exercising their First Amendment rights, but when it comes to criminals the issue is far murkier than Redden implies. In this book's "Case Study Eight" he describes how the Italian Mafia (purveyors of untold numbers of serious crimes) has been mostly neutralized through the use of stool pigeons and infiltrators, but implies that this is a "snitch" operation just as bad as the others in the book. In Chapter 9 he condemns the "America's Most Wanted" TV show as a snitch operation, complaining about viewers acting as rats even though the show has helped catch hundreds of violent criminals. Redden's general overuse of the word "snitch" makes it more of an epithet toward any type of informant he disagrees with, and the moniker tends to lose its power. If this book had stuck with the truly troubling surveillance of law abiding citizens for political purposes, it would seem far less paranoid than it ultimately proves to be.

Author Jim Redden wrote "Snitch Culture" in order to bring together disparate examples of how our government and our society has embraced the concept of "snitching," or informing on one another. Everybody professes to hate a snitch. Think of all the various labels we have for someone who informs on another person: snitch, tattletale, rat, stool pigeon, whistleblower, fink, and several others I am probably forgetting. None of these words convey a positive image, do they? Think of all of the media images that show what happens to someone who snitches on another person and you will usually discover that these images are not positive ones. Nowadays, however, we live in a new era, an era that encourages citizens to inform on other people. A respected national magazine made corporate whistleblowers their "Person of the Year" recently, if memory serves me correctly. Law enforcement always pays good money for information on people who commit even the most mundane crimes. And the less said about schools the better. Perhaps our society suffers from a massive case of hypocrisy, where we believe one thing (ratting out another person is bad) but praise it nonetheless (someone broke the law! Get them!). I suspect most of us have no idea how many schemes our ruling institutions have cooked up in order to amass information about us. Certainly, the recent "Patriot Act" enacted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack still receives much attention from watchdogs that criticize the government for its sudden interest in our library records. Well, Redden rides to the rescue with chapter after chapter of documented skullduggery from nearly any institution you can think of, both public and private.
It is difficult to summarize the most egregious cases outlined by Redden in this book because they are all horribly invasive and oftentimes ethically wrong. Perhaps the widespread use of informants in legal prosecutions ranks the highest, where federal and state attorneys pay money to nearly anyone with a story to tell. The fact that sometimes this information is an out and out lie doesn't bother the authorities in the least, even when wrong information leads to the death or injury of an innocent person. Redden finds such an account in the case of a man seriously wounded by police when a drug snitch threw his name out at random even though this man was completely innocent of any crime. The federal government doesn't stop there. The FBI and government intelligence apparatuses routinely spy on the American people, often in the name of "National Security." These institutions even want to know what you are looking at on your computer, and have made attempts to do just that by attaching spy equipment to some of the biggest servers in the country. Redden goes so far as to claim that there is no war on drugs, terrorism, or youth violence but only a war on the American people over gathering information on all of us.
It isn't just government resorting to immoral information gathering. Corporations and private watchdog groups do it quite often. Companies now monitor the Internet in order to see what their employees are doing. This may not sound like a bad idea, as wasted labor does impact a business's bottom line. The problem comes when bosses punish people for running private websites on their own time and not accessing them from work. Yes, this apparently happened in several instances, at least according to Redden. Private watchdog groups present another example of the snitch culture. The author cites the infamous case of the Anti-Defamation League's illegal gathering of information. The ADL, ostensibly dedicated to rooting out dangerous racist groups throughout the country, also spies on just about anyone it wants to regardless of political affiliations. A raid on their San Francisco office turned up thousands upon thousands of documents on organizations and people with absolutely zero links to racist organizations. Even worse, the ADL often shares information with police departments around the country, forming a link between private and government institutions that like to spy.
War and the threat of war constitute one of the major tenets of the snitch culture. During the conflict in Kosovo, suspicious evidence exists that an anti-war website created to oppose NATO operations in this former Yugoslavian province suffered a computer attack from the United States military. The website wasn't really hurting anyone, just providing news accounts of activities in the region with a view towards stopping the war. The operators of the site soon learned that a private watchdog had labeled their efforts "militia" activity, and shortly thereafter the site went down after being bombarded by so many requests for information that the server crashed. Scary stuff, even if the operators of the site will never know for sure that military computer specialists launched the attack, but there are several pieces of compelling evidence that our armed forces were behind this computer generated assault. I could go on and on about the endless examples Redden cites regarding snitching, spying, and information gathering.
The one drawback to the book is one that most reviews mention: Redden rarely distinguishes between times when snitching is useful and when it is illegal. In this author's world, ALL information gathering efforts fall into negative categories. In a way, I do agree with his analysis even though there are cases where informing on other people is a necessity. Redden recognizes that human nature always seems to make us go overboard on something when a crisis arises. Therefore, even good spying nearly always leads to abuses. "Snitch Culture" does a good job collating information about these massive abuses, but does little to present realistic solutions to the problem.