by Claire Wolfe
An understated announcement hit a small political corner of the ’Net. The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) said it was severing all relations with a young woman named Stacy Litz. Without elaboration, C4SS said it wished Ms. Litz well in her efforts to redeem herself and hoped people would donate to cover the legal expenses of victims of her work as a police informant.
Huh?
The statement was so low key it took a few minutes of head-shaking before readers hit the search engines. But then Stacy Litz went from obscure-but-growing activist to nationwide villain faster than a Ferrari can go from zero to 60.
The story in brief: While campaigning for libertarian causes (including opposing the War on Drugs), Stacy Litz, a student at Drexel University in Philadelphia, got herself busted for selling drugs to an undercover cop. Instead of facing the penalties, instead of going public with her plight, she kept mum and rapidly agreed to become a police agent. She managed to talk three of her friends into committing drug felonies before she was outed.
She blames the police for making her name public. But her (former) friends also spotted an “anonymous” blog she kept about her snitching. They let the world know.
Since her outing, Stacy has continued to dig herself a deeper and deeper hole.
In the end, her clumsy snitching didn’t even help her. She’s now facing 13 felony charges and may well end up spending longer in prison than she would have if she’d have just said a big, loud NO to snitching.
Unfortunately, Stacy’s story is unusual only in that her identity and her mindset went national. The snitch culture she joined is common, widespread, and catastrophic.
I don’t know how you regard the Drug War. IMHO, it’s a waste, a destroyer of freedom, and does more harm to families and individuals than any drug it claims to fight.
But even if you think it’s a war worth fighting, there’s no doubt that the snitch culture fostered by the War on Drugs is corrosive, tragic — and spreading. It’s a culture of mistrust, injustice, corruption, and perfectly predictable unintended consequences that now infiltrates society far beyond the world of drug users.
Literally nobody is safe from the horrible effects of snitching nowadays. With everyone from the FBI to the ATF to the IRS using covert snitches (both freelance and employed), and with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) urging any moron who “sees something” to “say something,” we live in An Informer Society.
Here are just a few — a very few — of the multitude of consequences.
• Snitching lets the “kingpins” get off lightly by ratting out the little people — who end up in prison because they have no information to trade.
• In many cases, snitches are far worse human beings than the people they put in prison. Here’s an ATF informant you wouldn’t want your daughter to meet.
• In many cases, they are more hardcore criminals than the relative innocents they strive to implicate. (Fortunately this particular case against firearms-equipment dealers fell apart, but not until it had damaged 22 lives.)
• Snitches who are under pressure or hungry for money lie and target the innocent. Some of those innocents die.
• Snitches who were formerly honest people find they’ve been used by a cynical and corrupt system — like this gun dealer who ended up helping the ATF “walk” guns into Mexico.
• Even when there’s no actual snitch, snitch culture enables corrupt cops to claim they got info from a snitch and then plant drugs. In some places, it’s business as usual. Again, innocents suffer.
• Frightened, unprepared snitches get murdered. (Another.)
• Snitches and agents provocateur create crimes that would not otherwise have happened. The FBI has become notorious for “solving” terrorist conspiracy cases that their own covert agents masterminded. Here’s one example. And another.
• Fools are now actively encouraged to snitch on anybody and everybody. They flood hotlines with dumb tips, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and diverting agents from investigating real crimes.
• You think all drug users deserve what they get? Well how about Anne Lenhart? The war on drugs has turned into a war on pain patients — complete with informants.
I could have given hundreds of examples like those. Thousands.
Snitches and their culture of treachery have invaded the worlds of gun owners, hacktivists, Occupiers, doctors, libertarians, taxpayers, food importers, small retailers, antiwar protestors, even farmers (.pdf), for heaven’s sake.
Today, the guy who comes to fix your phone could be a snitch. The UPS man could be a snitch. The clerk at the surplus store. Your banker. The guy who inks your latest tattoo. The woman who does your hair. Your best friend could be a snitch. And they could report on you for perfectly innocent activities. In fact, the DHS encourages exactly that. And so does the FBI.
What happens to a society when people realize they can’t trust their neighbors, their friends, their business contacts, even their closest family members?
You don’t have to make any big guesses. All you have to do is look at very recent history. In the Soviet Union. Even more notoriously in East Germany.
Given the horrors of their history, some former communist countries now strictly limit use of snitches and agents provocateur — at the very time the “Land of the Free” is embracing these rats in multitudes.
This isn’t going well. It isn’t going to go well. Ever.
Claire Wolfe is the author of the Paladin books The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship, Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, and I Am Not a Number, and a contributor to The Paladin Book of Dangerously Fun Stuff and Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 2.