Snitching used to be considered one of the lowest forms of betrayal, only a notch or two up from sleeping with your best friend's spouse. Now it seems to be all the rage.

The fallout from Michael Phelps and the bong, A-Rod and steroids, and Christian Bale's movie-set meltdown all resulted from someone who snitched. The website Yobusted.com extends the privilege of being internationally humiliated beyond celebrities to common folk: Anyone can submit a compromising photo of you, which you have to pay $20 to $50 to have removed by becoming a "member." Part of the fee kicks back to the submitter.

Let's narrow down who we're talking about here. Not whistle-blowers, who risk their jobs for the common good, such as FBI agent Coleen Rowley. Government informants and paparazzi can be snitches of a sort, but they do it for a living.

The ultimate snitches are righteous creeps who publicly embarrass others who have done them no harm. They may do it openly, but more often furtively. They do it out of cowardice, or for the twisted satisfaction of lowering someone of whom they're envious.

Mark Snyder, director of the Center for the Study of the Individual in Society at the University of Minnesota, sees simultaneous but competing motives to snitch: "You want to alert society to hypocrisy, but you also want something personal from it -- social recognition, for example. But snitches often get turned on eventually. The sense of fair play, that everyone should play by the rules, is strong, but so is the sense that if it's not hurting you, leave it alone."

Is snitching on the rise? It may only seem so because technology makes it so much easier. Everyone's cell phone has a camera, and any image can instantly go viral online. But snitching also has less of a stigma than it did even one generation ago. Young people (and their Facebook-addled parents) splash every detail of their lives all over the Internet, so boundaries once clear are now opaque. There no longer seems to be any such thing as "too much information." Twitter, twitter.

Thus snitching becomes acceptable under the general snark umbrella. It only takes a few rat finks to create a frenzy of finger-wagging and schadenfreude among everyone else.

The Snitch Hall of Fame has to begin with Judas, of course, followed by Benedict Arnold. Leaping ahead to the 20th century, Elia Kazan and Jerome Robbins ratted out their Hollywood peers in the McCarthy hearings. The most notorious snitch of recent history has got to be Linda Tripp, who coaxed a naive Monica Lewinsky into confiding her dalliance with then-President Bill Clinton under the pretext of friendship. And we know how well that worked out for her -- a couple of days of limelight basking, then a quick descent to friendless TV punch line.

Tripp appeared to enjoy her brief fame. But that can't have been the motivation for the betrayers of Phelps, A-Rod and Bale, because they haven't come forward.

Back in the 1990s, a campaign called "Stop Snitchin'" ignited controversy, because prominent athletes got involved in encouraging young people in black neighborhoods not to inform on known criminals through a sense of cultural and community loyalty.

We need a new, different kind of "stop snitchin'" campaign, one that brings honor and personal integrity back into the picture. Maybe it's already begun. Last I checked Yobusted.com, the site was "under construction."

Kristin Tillotson • 612-673-7046