Source: “Writing, Speech, and Silence” by Sara Peretsky, Booklist, May 1, 2003,
pages 1518-1520
...Under the PATRIOT Act, the police [do] not have to explain why they [want] a
warrant….To get a warrant, they don’t have to show probably cause: they do not have
to offer proof of any kind….they can come into my house, search and seize my files,
confiscate my books, and download data from my computer—all without telling me,
without showing me a warrant. They can do that to any individual in America. The can
do that in our libraries. With these powers, the government can identify everyone
reading any book, whether they’re checking it out of the library or buying it in a store....
We…have a model of a country that followed that plan for 70 years. In the old Soviet
Union, you could do hard labor for reading the wrong kind of books. Or for writing
them….
This past October a man looking at foreign-language pages on the Web in a New
Jersey library was taken into custody as he left the building. Another patron, without
enough to read on his own, had become alarmed at seeing non-English text on his
neighbor’s screen and had called the cops; they held the man for two days without
charging him, without letting him call his lawyer or call home. They finally released
him without any comment. The FBI recently came into St. Johns College in Baltimore
and arrested a student in the school library: the youth was logged onto a live chat
room and had criticized the president of the United States. The college is under a gag
order: the instructor who reported the incident could be arrested for talking about it….
We have government that has by fiat sealed presidential papers from public view. We
have a government that will not reveal the names of the people who created America’s
energy policy—your policy and mine—because they claim that naming their advisors
will undermine national security. We have a government that is trying to set up a
Soviet-style system of citizens spying and reporting on each other—a system whose
first consequence was to shut down an interstate highway to trap three medical
students. We have a government that in the past month tapped the home phones and
e-mails of UN delegates from Chile, Mexico, Pakistan, and Cameroon….
Every state has laws to protect the privacy of our library patrons: what we read, what
we check out, what we look at online is our business…The PATRIOT Act overturns
those confidentiality laws. The PATRIOT Act allows the government to compel libraries
to produce circulation and Internet use records. If served with a subpoena, libraries
and librarians may not disclose the existence of the subpoena, nor the fact that
records were produced as a result of a subpoena. Patrons cannot be told they are the
subject of an FBI investigation. According to the Connecticut Law Review, the FBI or
local police used the PATRIOT Act to seize or search library records at least 546 times
in the act’s first year. These are only the numbers that have been reported…. Any
librarian in America could spend years in prison for telling their patrons or their
spouses, let alone a reporter, that the FBI had removed circulation records from their
library. At the same time he is relentlessly pursuing the nation’s readers, the attorney
general has blocked all efforts to track gun ownership. Perhaps the NRA can adopt a
new slogan: guns don’t endanger America, books do….
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