The article below is relevant to the surveillance society theme.
RR
FBI checking out Americans' reading habits
Bookstores, libraries can't do much to fend off search warrants
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, June 23, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/23/MN75593.DTL
For the first time since the Cold War, the FBI is visiting public
libraries to keep tabs on the reading habits of people the government
considers dangerous.
The searches of some records kept by libraries and bookstores were
authorized in an obscure provision of the USA Patriot Act, quietly
approved by Congress six weeks after Sept. 11. The act, passed
virtually without hearings or debate, allowed a variety of new federal
surveillance measures, including clandestine searches of homes and
expanded monitoring of telephones and the Internet.
Section 215 gave the FBI authority to obtain library and bookstore
records and a wide range of other documents during investigations of
international terrorism or secret intelligence activities.
Unlike other search warrants, the FBI need not show that evidence of
wrongdoing is likely to be found or that the target of its
investigation is actually involved is terrorism or spying. Targets can
include U.S. citizens.
Nearly everything about the procedure is secret. The court that
authorizes the searches meets in secret; the search warrants carried
by the agents cannot mention the underlying investigation; and
librarians and booksellers are prohibited, under threat of
prosecution, from revealing an FBI visit to anyone,
including the patron whose records were seized.
The only limitation in the law is that the investigation cannot be
entirely based -- though it can be partly based -- on activities
protected by the First Amendment, like speech or political organizing.
For example, campus radicals, the subject of FBI surveillance in the
past, could be targeted under the new law only if the government
alleged they had some connection to terrorism or espionage.
Civil libertarians are calling the program an attack on privacy and
freedom of thought. Associations of libraries and bookstores are
advising their members not to make or keep any records they don't
need.
The American Library Association, in guidelines adopted in January,
advised the nation's librarians to "avoid creating unnecessary
records" and to record information identifying patrons only "when
necessary for the efficient operation of the library."
"They can't find what we don't have," said Anne M. Turner, president
of the California Library Association and director of the Santa Cruz
library.
Ann Brick, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in San Francisco,
called Section 215 "a stunning assault on . . . First Amendment
freedoms" and said it also appears to violate constitutional standards
on searches.
But she said it could be hard to challenge, because "how can a target
challenge government activity that they don't know about?"
About all that's known publicly is that some libraries have been
contacted.
In a nationwide survey of 1,020 public libraries in January and
February, the University of Illinois found that 85 -- or 8.3 percent
-- of them had been asked by federal or local law enforcement officers
for information about patrons related to Sept. 11, said Leigh
Estabrook, director of the school's Library Research Center.
It's not unheard of for a library to provide leads to authorities
about terrorists. In one publicized incident, a local librarian in
Florida recognized the names of three patrons on the list of suspected
Sept. 11 hijackers a few days after the attacks and called the FBI,
which then obtained computer records from the library.
Librarians and the FBI have been down this road before, most recently
in a Cold War initiative that began in 1973.
Herbert Foerstel was the head of branch libraries at the University of
Maryland at College Park in 1986 when he learned that FBI agents had
approached staff at two science libraries and asked about the reading
habits of anyone with a foreign-sounding name or a foreign accent.
After meeting with his subordinates and reminding them of their duty
to keep information about patrons confidential without a court order,
Foerstel did some research and took part in a Freedom of Information
Act lawsuit.
He learned, to his surprise, that the FBI had been visiting science
libraries around the nation for 13 years under a project that became
known as the Library Awareness Program, and that FBI monitoring of
public libraries had actually started many years earlier.
Foerstel testified at congressional hearings on the program and later
wrote a book about it titled "Surveillance in the Stacks." He said the
FBI maintained it was gaining valuable information about which
scientific topics interested people from communist nations, and
asserted its legal authority to conduct surveillance in libraries,
though it backed off from the Library Awareness Program under public
pressure.
With the revelations, "a lot of library users felt they could no
longer trust libraries and were no longer willing to ask reference
questions if they thought the topic was controversial," Foerstel said.
He said those fears appeared to subside when state governments passed
laws, now in effect in every state except Kentucky and Hawaii, making
library records confidential.
But a federal law like the Patriot Act overrides state confidentiality
laws,
prompting concerns from library and bookstore organizations about the
possible effect on readers.
"If people know what they're accessing or reading is evidence of wrong
thinking, they're going to censor themselves," said Deborah Stone,
deputy director of the American Library Association's Office for
Intellectual Freedom.
The FBI's public information office did not respond to an inquiry from
The Chronicle about how the law would be used. But if an agent comes
calling, there's not much that a librarian or bookseller, or their
lawyer, can do except make sure the warrant is in order, then
surrender any records that exist. Organizations of librarians and
independent booksellers are recommending that their members make and
preserve only the records they need.
The FBI hasn't said why agents would seek such information or what
they would do with it. But Michael Woods -- until recently director of
the FBI's National Security Law Unit -- has said in at least two
forums that the bureau would follow all legal guidelines.
"There won't be any problems if the government obeys the law and keeps
within the restrictions," he told the online magazine Salon.com.
"He was very reassuring," said Stone, who heard Woods speak at an
American Library Association meeting in January. "He didn't deny any
of the possible implications, just kept trying to tell everybody it
wasn't going to be as bad as we thought.
"The response was, 'How would we ever know?' "
E-mail Bob Egelko at [log in to unmask]
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 5
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