[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:12540] BEWARE: MESSAGE CONTAINS INFORMATION. THAT
IS A DANGER/THREAT
Alfred Kagan
akagan at uiuc.edu
Thu Jan 22 09:43:43 CST 2004
From our own Susan Davis. I don't know where this was originally published.
>Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 19:23:06 -0500 (EST)
>From: Frederick W Stoss <fstoss at buffalo.edu>
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>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:12540] BEWARE: MESSAGE CONTAINS INFORMATION. THAT
>IS A DANGER/THREAT
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>FYI Fred Stoss, University at Buffalo
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 12:08:09 -0500
>From: Jean Dickson <dickson at buffalo.edu>
>Attention Tom Ridge!! Libraries are dangerous!!! --jean
>---------- Forwarded Message ----------
>>
>> January 10 / 11, 2004
>> The Deadly Secrets of the AlmanacDangerous Books
>> By SUSAN DAVIS
>>
>> Forever, people in power have been afraid of fiction.
>> Wild imaginings threaten to undermine the view of the
>> world as unchangeable, the easy idea that history is
>> set in its course like footprints in cement. Novels,
>> poetry, plays, and even pornography have been
>> confiscated, burned and banned in both dangerous and
>> safe, settled times. Maybe late 2003, when United
>> States government alerted us to beware of people
>> carrying books of facts, was a turning point.
>>
>> On Christmas Eve, the FBI Counterterrorism Division
>> announced to all American law enforcement agencies
>> that "terrorist operatives may rely on almanacs to
>> assist with target selection and preoperational
>> planning. Almanacs, available both in print and
>> online, provide comprehensive information on a variety
>> of topics... that may be exploited for terrorist
>> use... " because they contain "profiles of US cities
>> and states and information on geographic and
>> structural features such as waterways, bridges, dams,
>> reservoirs, tunnels, buildings, and landmarks." Law
>> enforcement agencies were told to report any suspected
>> use of almanacs to their nearest FBI Joint Terrorism
>> Task Force.
>>
>> My first reaction on hearing about this was to laugh,
>> but the more I thought about it, the more sinister
>> suspicion of the almanac seems. The ancient almanac
>> (the root word is Arabic, meaning "the calendar") is
>> just one piece of a basic modern condition we enjoy in
>> the United States and elsewhere: abundant --- and in
>> many forms still free ---information. Warning people
>> against almanac carriers seems like warning against
>> dictionary collectors.
>>
>> The directive has gotten a lot of laughs in the media
>> lately. Perhaps to justify it, reports trickled out,
>> first over the BBC radio news and then a day later a
>> short notice in the Wall Street Journal and on
>> National Public Radio. The almanac threat might have
>> been real. The United States' Christmas week alert,
>> unnamed sources alleged, drew on information the
>> Department of Homeland Security received that Al Qaeda
>> operatives with "dirty bombs" might be spreading
>> radiation around five American cities. Tom Ridge sent
>> operatives carrying concealed radiation meters in golf
>> bags, to test downtowns and suburbs for contamination.
>> Target cities varied in differing reports.
>>
>> If these reports are true, almanacs really could be
>> deadly. So could tourist guides, USGS maps,
>> gazetteers, geological handbooks, and calendars of
>> special events. And year books, and world books, and
>> the Columbia Encyclopedia. If you take the FBI's
>> perspective, every decently-run public library is a
>> major threat to national security. It seemed
>> reasonable to have a look at mine.
>>
>> The Urbana Public Library is a Carnegie Library, built
>> with the robber baron's philanthropy in the early 20th
> > century. (In pursuit of public improvement and popular
>> enlightenment, Andrew Carnegie offered to provide the
>> buildings if cities and towns agreed to provide the
>> collections.) It's an elegant structure, with a
>> wonderful staff, and it enjoys wild popular support in
> > our town of 32,000 people. One of the most heavily
>> used public libraries in the United States, the Urbana
>> public is open on Sundays. Late one Tuesday afternoon
>> it was packed with senior citizens, homeless people
>> getting out of cold, and high school kids pretending
>> to do homework.
>>
>> I pulled a bunch of books off the reference shelf,
>> almost at random, to see just how much dangerous
>> information was within reach of any old lunatic, me
>> included. The answer is: plenty.
>>
>> Prominently displayed because it's very popular is the
>> Index to How to Do It Information, a guide to magazine
>> articles about how to make things. Alongside
>> instructions for building your own china cabinet, you
>> can find how to make an "Eavesdropping Device," also
>> called "Bionic Ears," from items easily available at
>> your hardware store (see also: "Voice Scrambler"). The
>> bionic ears "look strange when you wear them," but
>> they let you "hear far-off sounds in stereo." I looked
>> under "Hanging Planter" but I didn't find any
>> described as "useful for signaling a contact."
>>
>> There are scores of indexes of business information.
>> One of the most useful is the Dun & Bradstreet's
>> Billion Dollar Directory: America's Corporate
>> Families. It's full of basic facts about corporations
>> and industries. You can find addresses and phone
>> numbers for all of the branches and affiliates of a
>> major corporation, discover what each division
>> produces, estimate numbers of employees for each
>> plant, and if you're interested, note the names of all
>> the officers and the Board of Directors. Who uses the
>> Billion Dollar Directory? Investors, job hunters,
>> reporters -- but environmental and anticorporate
>> activists find it handy, too. And aren't these groups
>> considered potential terrorists under US law?
>>
>> There are literally hundreds of tourist guides
>> describing cities and their infrastructures in the
>> Urbana Public Library. There are geographies, and if
>> you follow FBI logic it's the geographers who must be
>> stopped. They give the most specific driving
>> directions, right down to the mile marker, and they
>> include maps and photographs. One of the best books I
>> found was a guide to the multiply-branched Chicago
>> River, written by a geographer. He not only locates
>> the Studs Terkel Bridge and describes the tunnels
>> carrying fiber-optic cable under the Loop, he tells
>> you how to paddle your way into the heart of the Windy
>> City, and gives advice on where to tie up your canoe.
>> Doesn't Tom Ridge warn against terrorists arriving by
>> water?
>>
>> Engrossing in a different way is Mark Crawford's
>> handbook Toxic Waste Sites: An Encyclopedia of
>> Endangered America. It describes more than 1300 of the
>> most dangerous federal Superfund sites (toxic dumps or
>> spills prioritized for cleanup by the Environmental
>> Protection Agency since the 1970s), listing them state
>> by state. Crawford includes appendices of common toxic
>> hazards, ranks federally recognized contamination by
>> state (New Jersey is number one with 109 identified
>> sumps), maps, and worst of all, a long list of
>> "Additional Reading." It contains more than I wanted
>> to know about how old industrial and military sites
>> threaten the health of millions of Americans through
>> drinking water, air and soil exposure.
>>
>> I took a turn through the chapter on Illinois and my
>> eye fell upon a map. In DuPage County, home of West
>> Chicago and other suburbs and unincorporated areas,
>> there's a little rose-shaped cluster of Superfund
>> dots. Crawford writes that the banks of the DuPage
>> River, the river itself, one of its tributary creeks,
>> surrounding subdivisions, parks, air and ground water
>> within roughly a three mile radius have been polluted
>> for decades by radioactive wastes, especially thorium.
> >
>> The corporate PRP (possibly responsible party) is
>> Kerr-McGee of Oklahoma uranium processing fame, which
>> apparently bought several industrial and military
>> manufacturing plants in area, including a uranium
>> processing mill and a sewage treatment plant. This
>> last received decades worth of powerfully toxic
> > wastes, which then spread into streams and ground
>> water. Radioactive sands and soils were also used for
>> house and road construction and landfill. The plants
>> operated from as early as 1931 until 1973, and,
>> although Kerr-McGee signed a consent decree in the
>> early eighties to clean up the mess, in 1996 an EPA
>> investigation concluded that contamination was still
>> spread broadly. In late 2003, the Chicago Tribune
>> reported that hundreds of millions of dollars later,
>> and after ferocious citizen pressure, further cleanup
>> was needed. In the meantime, other sorts of pollution
>> had been detected in the DuPage County groundwater,
>> including PCBs, trichloroethylene, radium and mercury,
>> and some joker was caught unloading a slab of
>> radioactive waste in a nearby forest preserve. (He was
>> fined.)
>>
>> Just one county in Illinois, just five old sites, just
>> tens of thousands of people at risk over decades and
>> decades. Make that at least five decades. How many of
>> them knew the danger they might be in, and when? It
>> makes you wonder about the definition of a "dirty
>> bomb." And it makes you wonder whether the people who
>> live in DuPage County are panicked by the reports of
>> radiation-packing Al Qaeda operatives in Chicago? Or
>> have they gotten used to persistent, low-grade fear
>> after decades of dealing with Kerr-McGee and the EPA?
>>
>> With no answer at hand, I left the reference section
>> and a huge pile of frightening fact books waiting to
>> be reshelved. On the basis of an expedition like this
>> you could conclude that indeed, information is
>> dangerous. But reviewing the facts from West Chicago,
>> or almost anyplace else, you could come to a different
>> conclusion. In order to decide who and what to be
>> afraid of, we need more information, not less. And we
>> need to have it from the widest stream of independent
>> sources, not the tiny toxic trickle we've gotten used
>> to.
>>
>> Susan Davis teaches at the University of Illinois,
>> Urbana-Champaign. She can be reached at:
>> sgdavis at uiuc.edu
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
--
Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA
tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu
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