Remember a few years back, when then Attorney General John Ashcroft introduced the TIPS program? You know, the nationwide law enforcement initiative technically known as the Terrorist Information and Prevention System, whose stated purpose was to recruit “American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.” Remember the willies some of us may have gotten at the prospects of our cable guy reporting on our choice of books, posters, or music?

Well, the folks that run the Baltimore-Washington MARC train seem to have taken after the TIPS program, as a picture we received via a fellow blogger at Articulatory Loop seems to indicate. “Watch, Ride, and Report,” the poster warns, amidst a backdrop that could have come straight from the twisted mind of George Orwell’s 1984 or an out-of-work Soviet propagandist.

Whatever the purpose of the program and however mystifying the artwork, this DCist knows to leave the Noam Chomsky at home and settle instead for the patriotically unthreatening romance novels of Danielle Steel.

Oh wait. Word has it that Steel splits her time between San Francisco and France. Traitor!