From an article1:
"That's why Section 215 is bad. It doesn't matter if it's one or 10,000 inquiries, once you start down this slippery slope of gagging people and cloak-and-dagger secrecy, you remove such an important check in the checks and balances of intellectual freedom versus national security that there's bound to be abuse."
The survey, which kept the identities of libraries anonymous, also found that many are taking steps to maintain the privacy of records on who has checked out books or signed up to use computers.
Of those that responded, 78 percent said they shred paper documents such as computer sign-in sheets, while 73 percent delete computer files and logs.
Forty-one percent of the libraries polled said they had implemented new policies as a direct result of the Patriot Act, and most of those said they had altered policies related to patron confidentiality and retention of records to keep them out of the FBI's hands. (
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Librarians are awesome people.
Complete text of the article,
Liberty in the balance: Librarians step up, by Sam Stanton and Emily Bazar
Tucked behind the circulation desk at the library on the campus of California State University, Sacramento, there is a simple red binder labeled "Search Warrant Procedures."
Inside are copies detailing exactly how library workers are to respond if the FBI shows up asking for information about the reading habits of library patrons.
In Santa Monica this summer, the city libraries posted signs: "Attention library patrons: The FBI has the right to obtain a court order to access any records we have of your transactions in the library, a right given to them by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act."
South Pasadena has done the same, as has Santa Cruz. In Seattle, librarians hand out bookmarks warning patrons that their reading habits may fall into the hands of federal agents.
Across the nation, librarians and bookstore owners have taken to warning patrons that their records are vulnerable to FBI searches under the USA Patriot Act, and many have joined local groups in condemning the law's reach.
"If I read about terrorism, am I a terrorist?" asked Rhonda Rios Kravitz, a librarian at CSUS who is spearheading a wholesale review of the school's policies on patron privacy. "Should a student's records be subject to subpoena just because they happen to be from Iran or Iraq?"
With the help of a nationwide campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, people are asking those questions in metropolitan areas as well as farming communities such as Woodland, where the city library bought a shredding machine in July to dispose of certain records, including sign-up sheets for Internet access.
The impetus is Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which gives the FBI authority to seek a subpoena from the secretive federal anti-terrorism court to obtain virtually any record a library has of readership habits or computer use. Under the provision, the FBI can declare that agents need the information simply as part of a criminal investigation.
"The FBI is not required to show probable cause -- or any reason -- to believe that the target of the order is a criminal suspect or foreign agent," the ACLU charges in a lawsuit challenging Section 215.
The resulting subpoena can be used in a variety of ways, including seeking library records, banking files, medical information and information from bookstores on what patrons have purchased.
Federal officials say the provision is rooted in the notion that a would-be terrorist seeking information on bomb-making would not use his own computer, but instead would turn to seemingly anonymous terminals and bookshelves in public libraries.
Supporters of the law say the concerns have been blown out of proportion and that Section 215 is being exploited by groups opposed to the Patriot Act.
"The ACLU has done a brilliant job with this," said Larry Brown, the No. 2 official in the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento. "They're spreading misinformation about it just like they did with the death penalty and 'three strikes.' "
Attorney General John Ashcroft said last week that the "hysteria and hyperbole" over the provision had reached such a pitch he had decided to declassify information on how many times the section has been used.
"The number of times Section 215 has been used to date is zero," Ashcroft wrote in a memo to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.
Librarians contend, nonetheless, that law enforcement has sought information from them repeatedly since the Sept. 11 attacks. Across the nation, they have joined with bookstore owners, city councils and other local groups struggling to deal with the Patriot Act.
While the law has been roundly criticized by liberal and conservative groups alike, the most controversial part so far has been the power it gives federal agents to probe library records. Section 215 makes it a crime for a librarian even to divulge the fact that agents have delivered a subpoena.
To get around that, some libraries have taken odd steps. In Santa Cruz, for instance, library director Anne Turner has devised this method:
"When I'm reporting to the board, in my standard oral report to the board, I say we've not been contacted by the FBI in the last month," Turner said. "The month I don't say it, the board will know I have been contacted because, of course, I'm not allowed to tell them."
Many librarians say flat out they've never been asked for records, while some others, such as Sacramento Public Library Director Anne Marie Gold, say the law precludes her from even answering the question.
Federal officials say that, in any case, there's no army of agents sifting through your library records or the hard drives of library computers peeking at what you read.
"During my tenure, we have not approached any library for anything," said Michael Mason, who until August was special agent in charge of the Sacramento FBI field office, which oversees an area from the Oregon state line to Bakersfield.
There is a long history of the FBI using information from libraries to conduct probes. The American Library Association and many librarians note that the "Library Awareness Program" was used by agents in the 1970s and 1980s to ferret out information on potential Soviet supporters. Agents routinely would ask for records without a court order.
More recent approaches also have been made, including during the Unabomber probe, when FBI agents visited libraries in the Bay Area and elsewhere seeking names of patrons who might have checked out books named in the bomber's so-called manifesto.
Within a week of the Sept. 11 attacks, someone from the U.S. Air Force visited the Berkeley Public Library and said he was investigating a hacking attempt on Air Force computers by someone using the library's computers, said library director Jackie Griffin.
Griffin said library officials told the Air Force they would be happy to cooperate, but needed a subpoena. The official pressed the case, noting the nation was in the midst of an emergency, but the library would not comply without the subpoena.
"They never came back," Griffin said.
The insistence on officials having some sort of court order to obtain library records is not a whim of librarians.
Forty-eight states have laws protecting the confidentiality of library records, while there are legal opinions in the other two -- Kentucky and Hawaii -- that say those states' records are confidential also, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the American Library Association.
The concern over library records has sparked a bill in Congress by Rep. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., to exempt libraries and bookstores from Section 215.
"One of the cornerstones of our democracy is our right as Americans to criticize our government and to read printed material without fear of government intrusion," Sanders said at a Washington press conference announcing his bill in March. "That's a basic American right."
So far, the measure has attracted 135 co-sponsors, including many who originally voted for the Patriot Act.
Concern over library privacy has spread across the nation, with libraries in unlikely spots taking steps to protect patrons.
In Woodland, for instance, librarian Marie Bryan has been ripping up records by hand as her stand against the Patriot Act.
In July, the library received a new shredder to help keep records out of federal hands; its use is legal until the library receives a subpoena seeking information.
"For me, it has been like waiting for the other shoe to drop," Bryan said. "When is someone going to be knocking on the door with search warrants? There have been no requests for information yet. That's a relief, but that doesn't mean it won't happen."
The government has made it clear it believes citizens have no right to expect their library usage or bookstore purchases to be private matters.
In response to questions from the Senate last year about how far the government can go, Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant said citizens give up certain rights when they check out or buy a book.
"Any right of privacy possessed by library and bookstore patrons in such information is necessarily and inherently limited since, by the nature of these transactions, the patron is reposing that information in the library or bookstore and assumes the risk that the entity may disclose it to another," Bryant wrote in response to the Senate queries.
Nationwide, at least 545 libraries were visited by federal or local law enforcement officials seeking patrons' records in the year after Sept. 11, 2001, according to a University of Illinois study.
In 209 of the libraries, staffers "voluntarily reported patron records or behaviors to authorities in relation to terrorism" rather than require a court order, the study found.
A separate study of 344 public and academic libraries in California found that 16 libraries reported having informal contact with FBI agents since Sept. 11, 2001, and six complied with their requests for information.
That study, conducted for The Bee by the California Library Association, found that 14 libraries reported having "formal" contact with FBI agents during that time, and that 11 complied with the requests.
For the purposes of the survey, a "formal" contact was one involving a court order, said Karen Schneider, chairwoman of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the California Library Association.
Schneider took issue with Ashcroft's assertion that the FBI has not asked libraries for information under Section 215, saying she found that "highly unlikely." But given the section prohibits librarians from discussing such visits, she said, it is impossible to know for sure what law enforcement is asking for in these visits or what legal authority they are citing.
"This is the whole Catch-22 of 215. You can't talk about it. How are we supposed to know they're happening?" she said.
"That's why Section 215 is bad. It doesn't matter if it's one or 10,000 inquiries, once you start down this slippery slope of gagging people and cloak-and-dagger secrecy, you remove such an important check in the checks and balances of intellectual freedom versus national security that there's bound to be abuse."
The survey, which kept the identities of libraries anonymous, also found that many are taking steps to maintain the privacy of records on who has checked out books or signed up to use computers.
Of those that responded, 78 percent said they shred paper documents such as computer sign-in sheets, while 73 percent delete computer files and logs.
Forty-one percent of the libraries polled said they had implemented new policies as a direct result of the Patriot Act, and most of those said they had altered policies related to patron confidentiality and retention of records to keep them out of the FBI's hands.
"They've really been in a hurry to implement any of the necessary procedures before the knock on the door comes," Schneider said. "It's a tremendously proactive response on the part of the profession. Nationwide, it's typical of what's going on."
The concern among librarians reflects a long-held view that such institutions should be considered inviolate places of learning. A basic premise of academic freedom, they say, is that people should not be afraid to seek knowledge of any subject, and the threat of government snooping violates that notion.
"Libraries have always made it safe for people to look for information in a private way," said Griffin, director of the Berkeley Public Library.
"There's a fundamental idea here that if you look at a site about terrorism or look at a site about how to make a bomb or you look at a site that's about any of these ideas, somehow that's bad in and of itself. People have to have the ability to look and to judge and to find out for themselves. Our best defense against terrorism is to have a well-informed public."
Federal officials seem baffled by the outrage and contend that any use of the provision would be for valid investigative purposes only, not wholesale sweeps.
"Contrary to the perception that the FBI in Anytown, America, is going into the libraries and saying, 'Here's a warrant, we want the names of everybody who checks this book on bomb-making and violent jihad out,' we're going to a federal judge and saying we have reason to believe there's a terrorist cell or this person is a terrorist and that they are using the public library as a base of operations," said Ashcroft spokesman Mark Corallo. "It's a very narrow category."
But that message is met with skepticism in many quarters, including bookstores, where owners say that unless customers pay cash for their purchases their reading habits may be available to federal agents.
Neal Coonerty, who owns a bookshop in Santa Cruz, sent newsletters to 10,000 of his customers warning of that possibility.
"We don't believe that reading a murder mystery at the beach here means you're plotting a murder," Coonerty said. "And reading about Hitler doesn't mean you're a Nazi."
To some extent, bookstore patrons are more vulnerable to government probes than those who use libraries, Coonerty said, noting that the Internal Revenue Service requires store owners to save their paperwork for seven years, including cash register tape rolls.
"Unlike libraries, we can't destroy information after the books are sold," he said.
And paying cash isn't always a guarantee of anonymity.
At Coonerty's shop, members of the Frequent Buyers Club receive a 5 percent discount after buying 20 items from the store. Each member is assigned a number, which appears on the cash register receipt along with the names of the books that are purchased.
"That's a problem," Coonerty said, adding that about 10,000 customers belong to the club.
"We can't really change anything. We have to be able to track them. Between the IRS keeping our records for seven years, and our main marketing tool, which is our Frequent Buyers Club for our most important customers, we're sort of stuck."
Determining whether FBI agents have sought information from bookstores is difficult because of the provision that forbids the stores from telling anyone the information is being sought.
"We have advised booksellers that if they receive such an order, they can call us to request legal counsel," said Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. "We have told them they can't tell us what they're calling about."
So far, there are no indications that bookstores have been targeted, Finan said. But he added that there is no way to tell.
"We're unaware of any, which doesn't mean there haven't been any," he said.
reference=http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/liberty/story/7463163p-8405751c.html
The Clipboard: Liberty in the Balance, Part II