ARTS & FARCES internet

The Bush administration—through law enforcement—had made at least 200 and probably close to 600 requests to libraries for information on what citizens are reading since October 2001. So says a new American Library Association (ALA) study that found both formal and informal demands were made of librarians to disclose the reading habits of library patrons.

The ALA used anonymous responses to survey 1,500 public libraries and 4,000 academic libraries, finding 137 formal demands for information since October 2001.

Not surprisingly, according to Eric Lichtblau’s account in the New York Times, “the Bush administration says that while it is important for law enforcement officials to get information from libraries if needed in terrorism investigations, officials have yet to actually use their power under the Patriot Act to demand records from libraries or bookstores.”

One would think that the existence of a subpoena—if not the content of the subpoena—is a matter of public record, and it should be relatively easy to determine whether the Bush administration is telling the truth. That would be wrong: secrecy provisions of the Patriot Act make it a crime for a librarian to acknowledge even receiving a subpoena.

Nonetheless, abuses by the Bush administration are clear according to a source for Lichtblau’s article:

‘What this says to us,’ said Emily Sheketoff, the executive director of the library association’s Washington office, ‘is that agents are coming to libraries and they are asking for information at a level that is significant, and the findings are completely contrary to what the Justice Department has been trying to convince the public.’

And how does the Bush administration respond to the study? By saying that the library inquiries may be unrelated to terrorism or intelligence:

Kevin Madden, a Justice Department spokesman… questioned the relevance of the data to the debate over the Patriot Act, noting that the types of inquiries found in the survey could relate to a wide range of law enforcement investigations unconnected to terrorism or intelligence.

‘Any conclusion that federal law enforcement has an extraordinary interest in libraries is wholly manufactured as a result of misinformation,’ Mr. Madden said.

Thank your librarian today….