Madame Librarian: Defending terrorists' privacy while ignoring real repression
Masked Librarian
Madame Librarian
Defending terrorists' privacy while ignoring real repression
Friday, February 10, 2006 12:01 a.m.
On March 10, parts of the Patriot Act expire again. A key provision is
Section 215, most famous for the alleged threat it poses to library
patrons. Among all the horror scenarios raised by critics of the act,
the specter of feds bursting into public libraries and bookstores to paw
through the checkout-counter slips and emails of ordinary Americans has
loomed large.
For the record, Section 215 doesn't single out libraries but relates to
official requests for "tangible things (including books, records,
papers, documents and other items)." The provision is not known to have
been invoked yet against a library; and Congress plans to add additional
privacy and due-process safeguards.
Still, we don't see the controversy going away. So this may be a good
time to review the credentials of some of the loudest worriers about
Patriot Act and privacy predations, including the American Library
Association. To hear the ALA talk, librarians are the last bulwark
defending our most cherished civil liberties against government assault.
Yet two recent examples show again that self-anointed guardians of the
public good can be very selective about the people, and rights, they
choose to protect.
One example came from Newton, Mass., on Jan. 18, after someone used a
public-library computer to email a terrorist-attack threat to Brandeis
University. Many school buildings were evacuated, and FBI agents rushed
to the library hoping to track down the email sender in time to prevent
an attack. Once there, however, they were held off for some nine hours
by library director Kathy Glick-Weil--because they didn't have a
warrant. Newton's mayor later praised Ms. Glick-Weil for "protecting the
sense of privacy of many, many innocent users of the computers." More
important, it seems, than protecting the lives of many, many innocent
people who could have died if the threat had turned out to be imminent.
More revealing than a single librarian's awful judgment is the ALA's
forked tongue when it claims to defend all library freedoms. Since 1998,
Cuban authorities have arrested and imprisoned citizens who operate
"independent libraries," and destroyed their collections. Often based in
houses, these libraries provide books and other information, such as the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, considered criminal by the
Communist dictatorship.
Human-rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have
condemned the repression and called for the librarians' release. Yet the
ALA refuses to even acknowledge their suffering Cuban counterparts. It
apparently accepts the Cuban government's assertion that "the
dissidents" don't qualify as librarians and that freedom of information
flourishes on the island.
A cat jumped out of the bag at the ALA's January meeting in San Antonio,
though, when keynote speaker and Romanian-born author Andrei Codrescu
blasted the organization for abandoning the independent librarians. "Is
this the same American Library Association that stands against
censorship and for freedom of expression everywhere?" To add insult to
injury for apoplectic ALA leaders, a subsequent informal poll of the
rank-and-file in an electronic newsletter suggested that 75% want the
organization to stand up for the Cubans.
On Sunday, ALA President Michael Gorman emailed the newsletter's editor
to say that "we would be better off without these polls." That smells
like censorship--from the very same people who bring us "Banned Books
Week." An organization that roars about the chilling effect of Section
215 on library users also looks pretty hypocritical when its own
member-readers are discouraged from circulating their opinions openly.
All something to remember in March, or any time the ALA next tells us
that, on issues of freedom, librarians know best.