Redden: No, I think we can expect the same over-reaction that started under Clinton. The truth is, Clinton expanded the surveillance society more than any President since Nixon. He used the Oklahoma City bombing as an excuse to dramatically increase the FBI's domestic intelligence-gathering operations, and he pioneered the dubious concept of portraying pimps and drug dealers as threats to the national security, threats which require a war-like response. I had to laugh whenever I heard Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative blowhard attack Clinton as a liberal. Like throwing young mothers off welfare is a liberal idea!

But, yes, I expect the government to continuing pursuing the progressive activists. Ever since the WTO protests, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies has been focusing on the reborn Left.

The Portland City Council just approved an ordinance authorize the police to join a new FBI counter-terrorism task force. It's called the Portland Joint Terrorism Task Force, and it's one of nearly 30 such task forces created around the country by the Clinton Administration.

I called the local FBI office and asked who they were investigating. The answer was, eco-terrorists. The FBI didn't say militias or skinheads or Identity Christians or any of the other right-wingers who were supposedly so active in the 1990s. The answer was two groups on the far left, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.

Disinformation: You are highly critical of various "watchdog" groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Maldon Institute whom you refer to as "surrogate snitches." At what point does a political faction cross the line between merely "monitoring" political extremism and questionable surveillance and snitching?

Redden: There's a long history in this country of private groups spying on their fellow citizens, and then reporting them to the police or FBI.

I trace this history in a chapter titled "Private Intelligence Networks", which talks about such early groups as the Society for the Prevention of Vice in the 1870s and the superpatriot groups which spied on alleged communists in the 1950s and 1960s.

The most active such groups in recent years were the so-called civil rights watchdog groups, which spied on a broad range of political activists in the 1980s and 1990s. Not all of the people they watched were racists, right wingers or even conservatives. For example, the Anti-Defamation League was caught building files on literally thousands of political activists, including anti-apartheid, anti-war and gay organizations.

We're posting the complete list of all the files that were discovered during the scandal on the Feral House Web site, and I strongly encourage everyone to check it out. I guarantee you'll be amazed by the number of liberal and left wing groups youšll find there.

But your question is, when does a group like the SPLC cross the line?

Here's what I think.

Minorities face tremendous problems in this country, and the most serious ones are created by the government.

Racial profiling, bad schools in minority communities, the War on Drugs and the election problems revealed in Florida are just a few of the most obvious examples. Such practices create far worse problems for minorities than everything the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk are doing.

I think anti-racist activists make a mistake when they think individual racists are more of a problem than the government, and they cross the line when they begin working with the very government that creates these problems or allows them to continue.

And that's what the SPLC is doing, working with law enforcement agencies to crack down on alleged racists while ignoring and even excusing the harm caused by the government itself. I don't have any problem with the SPLC suing the Aryan Nations, but where are they on racial profiling, the Ramparts scandal, the Florida election, and issues like that?

The SPLC has excellent lawyers backed up by millions of dollars in donations. They could and should be representing minority victims of police violence, inner-city children kicked out of schools under zero-tolerance programs, things like that. Instead, they're spending all their time and money hassling a relative handful of private citizens who they think are racists.

OK, maybe there's some value to that. Maybe some of these alleged racists are so dangerous they need to be watched. I think self-proclaimed leaders like Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations, Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance and William Pierce of the National Alliance are fair game. They hold themselves out as leaders, they've started organizations, they've chosen to become public figures. It's fair to look into their pasts and see if walk their talk.

But groups like the SPLC goes far beyond monitoring such leaders. The SPLC brags about having thousands of names in their computer databases. Other so-called watchdogs make the same claims. There aren't thousands of racist leaders in this country.

So these groups have to be gathering information on followers and even curious people who merely attend meetings.

I know this is true. I was working on an article on Bo Gritz several years ago. When he spoke in town, I went to the meeting and discovered local anti-racist activists writing down the license plate numbers of everyone in the parking lot, including mine. I think that crosses the line, especially because I believe these groups provide the names they dig up to police intelligence agencies.

As noted in the book, the SPLC says it gave the FBI thousands of names of alleged anti-government extremists to the FBI after the Oklahoma City bombing. These people had nothing to do with the bombing, or any other plot against anyone. And as far as I know, my name was one of them.

But I think the influence of the anti-racist watchdogs groups has probably peaked, at least for the foreseeable future. Their basic premise that America is threatened by far right racists has been proven wrong. The Project Megiddo fiasco undercut their credibility. Joseph Lieberman's nomination didnšt spark an anti-Jewish backlash. To the contrary, he and Gore actually won the election. Minorities now perceive George Bush as a greater threat than David Duke. So anyone who spends the next four years trying to portray the Ku Klux Klan as the greatest threat facing the country is going to look silly.

As for as the private intelligence networks go, we're more likely to see the rise of conservative watchdogs over the next few years.

The Maldon Institute is a good example. It tracks progressive activists and provides intelligence reports about them to the police. As noted in the book, the Philadelphia police used a Maldon Institute report to help justify their crackdown on protesters during the Republican National Convention. I'm not saying this report was all that significant. I'm sure the Philadelphia police got far more intelligence on the protesters from the FBI. But hardly anyone but researcher Chip Berlet was even aware of the Maldon Institute before the report surfaced, so I think this is an issue we should all pay attention to in the coming years.

Disinformation: I was fascinated by your discussion of the "Third Wave Experiment", in which a Palo Alto high school teacher transformed a group of good-natured students into strict authoritarians. Do you believe Americans remain equally susceptible to this type of blind obedience and could this be a major factor in the evolution of the snitch culture?

Redden: This is a fascinating story. In 1967 a first-year history teacher named Ron Jones conducted an experiment. He organized a class along the lines of the Nazi Youth program to teach his students how easily Hitler was able to come to power. But the experiment quickly got out of control and the students began snitching on students who didn't buy into the program. Some students who objected were pushed around by their classmates. Jones wrote about the experiment several years later. The experiment so radicalized him that he quit teaching and started an experimental theater company. He saw how easily people can be manipulated by authority figures.