Ashcroft urges all Americans to snoop on their neighbors

Borowitz Report ^ | July 26, 2002

[Free2Be49]

Ashcroft urges all Americans to snoop on their neighbors

Operation TIPS Issues Handy Home-Spying Checklist

July 26, 2002

Borowitz Report
 http://www.borowitzreport.com/
 

Saying that “now is the time for all good Americans to snoop on their neighbors,” Attorney General John Ashcroft today unveiled what he called a “helpful home-spying checklist” as part of the Justice Department’s Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System):

1. Go through your neighbor’s garbage, looking for suspicious foreign food containers. Good foreign food: pizza, chop suey, fish and chips. Bad foreign food: everything else. Hard to tell: French food.

2. Put on a fake moustache and wig, ring your neighbor’s doorbell, and tell him that you are collecting signatures for a petition to insert the words “under God” into “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” If he refuses, contact the Department of Justice immediately.

3. When your neighbor isn’t looking, attach a miniature Geiger counter to his poodle. When the dog runs into the house, put your ear against the door and wait for that distinctive ticking sound.

4. Get outfitted in scuba gear and hide at the bottom of your neighbor’s pool. When your neighbor dives in, check to see if he is merely swimming for recreation or practicing for a scuba-based terror attack on the Eastern seaboard.

5. Shimmy up your neighbor’s rain gutter and peep through his bedroom window to see what he’s watching on TV. If he is desperately channel surfing to avoid seeing Ann Coulter again, contact the DOJ.

6. Impersonate a postal employee and wait behind the service window of your local post office. When your neighbor arrives with a package, nonchalantly say, “Shipping any hummus today?”

7. Repeat steps one through six, only this time, perform them on yourself. You’ve been acting awfully fishy lately.

 

[Free2Be49]

Humor can sometimes break the tension.

[Texasforever]

Except when it is so completely over the top as to cease to be funny. As Fred Barnes said about TIPS, "no good deed goes unpunished".

[Reaganwuzthebest]

It's good to see Ashcroft taking his job seriously which is to enforce the laws, especially with the illegal immigration mess, but with this TIPS program he has set himself up to be the butt of jokes probably for the rest of his term. It was a bad idea from the start and he should have known it.

[wienerdog.com]

Ashcroft has overplayed his hand, like the idiot that he is. With more and more people ridiculing this horrible disappointment of an Administration, one can only hope they are as paralyzed as the slobs before them. I can't believe W is now being called Il Duce. Hell, I remember when we were calling Clinton that while desperately waiting for him to be thrown in jail -- which still might have happened, except that W wanted to move on. To hell with all of them.

[steve50]

W has made sure nothing comes out on anybody with the EO on Presidential Papers. Just a bunch of crooks protecting each other, to hell with em all.

[wienerdog.com]

I hope no one calls the Freedom Corps on us for talking like this...

[APBaer]

"he has set himself up to be the butt of jokes"

He has such a "tin ear" it's hard to believe that he was ever a politician.

[wienerdog.com]

Same thing we were always saying about Hildebeast.

[steve50]

I don't think anybody needs to drop a dime on us, there's enough feds posing as joe citizen in here to get the job done

[Guillermo]

Deos it take an act of Government to make our neighbors nosy??

[not-an-ostrich]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt urges all Americans to snoop on their neighbors.

[weikel]

ROTFLMAO