[Peace-discuss] [Sdas] FW: Librarians Under Siege (fwd)

[parenti susan rose]

To add to what librarians can, and are, doing---

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:12:50 +0200
From: Marianne Brun <manni at snafu.de>
To: sdas at ojctech.com
Subject: [Sdas] FW: Librarians Under Siege


----------
Von: portsideMod <portsidemod at yahoo.com>
Antworten an: portside at yahoogroups.com
Datum: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 15:41:16 -0700 (PDT)
An: ps <portside at yahoogroups.com>
Betreff: Librarians Under Siege

Librarians Under Siege
Laura Flanders, The Nation
July 25, 2002

It used to be a matter of flashing a badge and
appealing to patriotism, but these days federal agents
are finding it a little harder to get librarians to
spy.

Under an obscure provision of the USA Patriot Act,
federal agents can obtain a warrant to acquire
information about library users. According to a recent
survey, agents have been showing up at libraries a lot,
asking librarians for reading records. Nearly
everything about the procedure -- from the granting of
the warrants to the search itself -- is secret (as an
excellent story in the San Francisco Chronicle pointed
out recently). But, unlike in the cold war years, when
the FBI last tried to conduct such library
surveillance, this time around, top librarians are on
the warpath to protect reader privacy. And Congress
wants Attorney General John Ashcroft to account for his
agents' library conduct. It wasn't like this back in
George W.'s daddy's day.

Between 1973 and the late 1980s, the FBI operated a
secret counterintelligence operation called the Library
Awareness Program. Back then the Feds were particularly
concerned about what Soviet bloc citizens were reading
in the nation's premier science libraries. In the words
of Herbert Foerstel, a science librarian in those
years, "Agents would approach clerical staff at public
and university libraries, flash a badge and appeal to
their patriotism in preventing the spread of 'sensitive
but unclassified' information."

Today, with Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act in hand,
law enforcement agents are at it again. This time, the
stated purpose is to gather information on people the
government suspects of having ties to terrorists or
plotting an attack. The act makes it hard to track just
what's going on. Anyone who receives an FBI request is
prohibited, under threat of prosecution, from revealing
the FBI visit to anyone, even to the patron whose
records are subject to search. On Apr. 3 I interviewed
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American
Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom,
on Working Assets Radio, and the interview illustrated
the problem. To paraphrase: Flanders: "How many
libraries have received information requests from the
FBI?" Stone: "They are not allowed to tell us, and we
are not allowed to say."

But in February one enterprising library sciences
professor sent a survey to 1,503 libraries around the
country. Dr. Leigh Estabrook asked librarians for
answers to a set of questions, to which they did not
have to append their name. According to Estabrook's raw
data, presented this spring at a Public Library
Association conference, eighty-five of the libraries
surveyed report that authorities (for example, FBI or
police) requested information about their patrons
pursuant to the events of Sept. 11. More worrisome,
about one-fifth of the libraries said staff had changed
their attitude toward or treatment of users in some
way. More than 10 percent (118) reported that they had
become more restrictive of Internet use. Seventy-seven
said they had monitored what patrons were doing.

Librarians on the alert aren't necessarily a bad thing.
In Florida, an attentive Delray Beach librarian
reported the use of her library by a group of Middle
Eastern men, and they turned out to have connections to
the attacks of 9/11.

But some of this monitoring may be illegal. Since the
abuses of the cold war, almost every state has passed
confidentiality laws to protect the privacy of personal
records. Since passage of the USA Patriot Act, the
American Library Association has been busy reminding
librarians of their abilities to question things like
federal search warrants and advising them of the best
practices to undertake to protect confidentiality of
patrons and themselves.

In January, the ALA released a set of guidelines to
inform librarians of what search warrants were, what
subpoenas were and how they could react if in fact they
were presented with such documents. Then in June, the
ALA's governing council passed a resolution publicly
affirming the privacy rights of patrons and implicitly
instructing library staff to do all they can to protect
their clients' privacy.

"Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech,
free thought and free association," says the ALA
council statement, in part. It wouldn't be a bad idea
for librarians to post the statement in the stacks.
Concerned library readers should also know that one
sure-fire way to keep your reading records private is
to take back your borrowed books on time. The ALA's
Stone told Working Assets Radio that the circulation
software most libraries use today automatically erases
a reader's borrowing record once a book is returned and
all fines are paid.

Congress is getting interested as well.

On June 13 a bipartisan committee sent a twelve-page
letter to John Ashcroft demanding details on the
implementation of the USA Patriot Act. Representative
James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, the
staunch conservative chair of the House Judiciary
Committee, and Michigan Democrat John Conyers, the
progressive, ranking Democrat, want to know, among
other things, just how many subpoenas the Justice
Department has issued to libraries, bookstores and
newspapers under Section 215 and what safeguards are in
place to prevent abuse. The letter asked for written
answers by July 9, which at presstime had yet to be
received; then Sensenbrenner and Conyers plan to hold
hearings on the response. Are G-men harassing your
librarian?

The hearings should make for good, hot summer viewing
on C-Span. Meanwhile, library staff are under a lot of
pressure. Why not drop by or write to your librarian
and send a message of support?

Laura Flanders is host of Working Assets Radio With
Laura Flanders, heard Monday to Friday on KALW (91.7
FM) in San Francisco, and on
www.workingassetsradio.com.



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