BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Saturday, August 28, 2004
THE SECRET LIBRARY POLICE.
Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young, in picking apart a
slightly daft piece
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., writes:
I assume Vonnegut is
referring to claims that under the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft's
goons have been terrorizing libraries and monitoring Americans'
reading habits. In fact, law enforcement agencies have always had
the power to request library records as part of a criminal
investigation; a provision of the Patriot Act gave them the power
to do so in counterterrorism investigations without notifying the
suspect. (Remember, we're talking about materials related to
terrorist acts and not, say, the wit and wisdom of Michael Moore.)
Whether or not such powers are appropriate, in the two years
after the passage of the Patriot Act this provision was used
exactly ... zero times. [Young's ellipses.]
No doubt Young was relying on
stories like this.
But here's an excerpt from the results of a study
conducted by the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign:
In the year after the
World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Federal and local law
enforcement officials visited at least 545 (10.7%) libraries to
ask for these records. Of these, 178 libraries (3.5%) received
visits from the FBI. The number of libraries queried fell
significantly below the 703 libraries reporting such requests the
year before the terrorist events. The actual number questioned
in the past year may, however, be larger, because the USA Patriot
Act makes it illegal for persons or institutions to disclose that
a search warrant has been served. A warning about these
secrecy provisions on the LRC questionnaire may have served, in
some cases, as a deterrent to candid answers. Fifteen libraries
acknowledged there were questions they did not answer because they
were legally prohibited from doing so.
In other words, the answer to the
question of whether and how the Patriot Act is being used to snoop on
library patrons is inherently unknowable, since the act also makes it
a crime for librarians to disclose whether they've been visited or
not. The very fact that the number of reported library visits
by law-enforcement officials fell in the year after 9/11 is
telling, wouldn't you say?
posted at 10:20 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
