Our federal government sure likes to have its cake and eat yours too.

Let’s talk about your cake first.

The Justice Department unveiled a new acronym this week called Operation TIPS, or the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. Sounds like just the brand of heavy-duty centralized spying this country needs to track down the angry men who want to kill us. Well, it sounds like it anyway.

Operation TIPS is a program that will collects terrorism tips (what a great acronym) from everyday working stiffs whose jobs put them on America’s roads, in its neighborhoods and inside its houses. According to the Operation TIPS Web site, the program will give “millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity.”

The Homeland Security folks say this isn’t Americans spying on each other. “It is not a government intrusion. The president just wants people to be alert and aware,” said Tom Ridge to the Associated Press. “We’re not asking for people to spy on people.”

Of course you’re not asking people to spy on each other. They’re not spies. They haven’t been trained as spies. The meter guy knows as much about how to spot terrorism as the grocery clerk who knows as much as the newspaper columnist who knows as much as the rest of the 99.9 percent of the population: nothing. But let’s not let that stop them from looking for, for, now wait a second, what are they looking for again?

Ridge says unto thee: “They might pick up a break in the certain rhythm or pattern of a community. They may pick up in the course of their daily business something that’s very unusual.”

Like what? Several Middle Eastern men living together? Beyond that, what disruptions of the community are we talking about? How can this not lead to racial profiling? How in Allah’s name is this supposed to produce any relevant information when the people you’re asking to provide the information have absolute no ability in understanding what would be relevant?

But just because a government program has little chance of being effective is no reason to chastise it. Certainly Operation TIPS will not be that expensive, other than the lost manhours chasing down the hot tip that Trucker Jim saw “one of them towelheads heading in the direction of the nuke-lee-er plant driving a pickup truck.”

There are plenty of other stellar reasons to hate Operation TIPS. Particularly troubling is the thought of a utility worker entering a private residence and then reporting the inhabitants of that home to the government because the gas man, drawing upon his vast counterterrorism experience, found the home to be suspicious.

As an American Civil Liberties Union spokeswoman put it in an interview with the AP: “The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms.”

In an amazing display of sanity or perhaps laziness, the Postal Service announced Wednesday that its carriers would not be taking part in Operation TIPS. The Postal Service gave no reason why it declined to participate, but I can imagine it had something to do with the fact that postal carriers have enough problems just delivering the damn mail.

There’s no reason to get all worked up, though, I guess. Hey, if we have to give up a little privacy in the name of national security, if society has to become more open, if all our dirty little secrets become harder to hide, then so be it. I’m down with recognizing this heightened threat and bending the rules of what society otherwise might be comfortable with because people are trying to kill us. And if the higher-ups think that one of the ways we can keep Americans from dying is to rely on our ship captains and refrigerator repairmen, then I’m all for it.

That’s when we get to the “have their cake” part.

At the same time the government is asking Americans to spy on each other (sorry Tom Ridge, you can call it whatever you want, but that’s what it is), the Pentagon and President George W. Bush are pushing for $7.6 billion next year to work on the missile defense system but would prefer not to provide Congress with any budget projections, performance objectives or development deadlines.

Let’s get this straight. They want the cable guy to check out my living room for possible terrorist activity, but they want to spend $7.6 billion in ONE YEAR with little Congressional oversight on a program to shoot down missiles from space that won’t be operational for another eight years and by their own admission may never work?

We could debate the wisdom of spending $7.6 billion on a defense system that, while very useful 20 years ago, bears hardly even a semblance of relevance when considering the current threats to national security, but let’s leave that for another day. Even more baffling than the belief that this country needs to be protected by space lasers, if anything can be more baffling, is the Pentagon’s belief that the multibillion-dollar space lasers in question should be designed in near-secrecy. Secrecy that the rest of America is being asked to surrender.

“I would respectfully disagree that there is a malicious conspiracy in the Pentagon to withhold information,” Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., told the AP.

Hey, is this Operation TIPS? Yeah, I’d like to report some suspicious activity. I’m from Iowa, so this isn’t in my neighborhood, but I think there’s something really wacky going on in northern Virginia. I’m not sure of the exact address, but it’s a big huge building with five sides. You might want to check it out.

Dave Roepke is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora. He is the opinion editor of the Daily.