“People should report criminal activity, but encouraging Floridians to spy on our neighbors and report on their activities – even activities which may be normal and routine – is not a reliable law enforcement technique,” Simon wrote in a statement. “Instead of turning up actual, reliable tips, this blunt approach pits neighbor against neighbor and citizen against citizen and increases suspicion and mistrust rather than building cooperation and understanding.”

So far there’s little evidence that the program has done more to foster terrorism than fight it, or that it has been abused by citizens or law enforcement personnel. DHS has been careful, since the start of the campaign, to emphasize its commitment to civil liberties and to steer people away from profiling. “Factors such as race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation alone are not suspicious,” reads the campaign’s home page. “For that reason, the public should report only suspicious behavior and situations (e.g., an unattended backpack in a public place or someone trying to break into a restricted area) rather than beliefs, thoughts, ideas, expressions, associations, or speech unrelated to terrorism or other criminal activity. Only reports that document behavior reasonably indicative of criminal activity related to terrorism will be shared with federal partners.”

The suspicions of the campaign’s civil liberties critics were not assuaged, however, when U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. – one of the campaign’s most vocal supporters – introduced the See Something, Say Something Act of 2011, which would provide civil immunity in U.S. courts for individuals who, acting in good faith and based on objectively reasonable suspicion, report threats to appropriate law enforcement officials. Why, these critics asked, does a person need civil immunity for reporting terrorism? Couldn’t such a law be used heedlessly as a tool to damage another person’s reputation?

It was not the first time such legislation had been introduced since the six “flying imams” – men who boarded a US Airways flight in November 2006 and were removed from the plane for exhibiting suspicious behavior – settled a lawsuit against the airline and the Minneapolis airport commission. The settlement outraged many who believed the men’s behavior to be, if not evidence of a terrorist plot, then deliberately designed to provoke suspicion (flying one-way without any checked baggage; refusing to sit in assigned seats but rather distributing themselves throughout the cabin in a grid pattern; talking to each other about Osama bin Laden in Arabic), and it was this case, more than any other, that led to support for an immunity law. The incident, however, has proven to be the only one of its kind in the last decade, and Congress has not yet deemed the passage of an immunity law to be a necessary measure. Cooler heads, it seems, have prevailed.

A more substantial criticism of the campaign is that it will swamp overburdened law enforcement resources with dead-end tips that could distract officers from meaningful work. It’s merely common sense to be suspicious of a man who buys an enormous quantity of smokeless gun powder while asking what it is, or of a smoking SUV in Times Square; a public awareness campaign, these critics say, is at best unnecessary.

In a February 2011 interview with The Washington Independent, David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, pointed out that the FBI receives 700 such messages a day, and the National Counterterrorism Center receives about 10,000 pieces of information daily. Flooding the system with more tips, the overwhelming majority of which describe innocuous behavior, won’t necessarily bring the agencies any closer to preventing a terrorist plot, he argued – and may even stretch resources to the point where they become a hindrance.

It’s too early to tell whether these are valid criticisms. “If You See Something, Say Something” is still relatively new, at least in its current form, and in the coming years, whether or not it can be credited reasonably with one or more foiled terrorist plots, or with ushering in a new era of McCarthyism – or neither, or both – will likely determine the campaign’s legacy.

This article was first published in The Year in Homeland Security: 2011/2012 Edition.