When 1984 passed with relatively minor whimpers of Big Brotherishness from the fringes of the society-at-large, it seemed that issues of governmental invasion of privacy and covert surveillance on the American citizenry were a thing of the past, or merely fiction after all. Those paranoiac years of the 1960s and early 1970s seemed filed away in a dusty corner of our collective gray matter.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however—in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s—attempted to recruit librarians to keep an eye on “suspicious activity” on the part of library patrons, especially those who use the photocopy machines and speak with foreign accents. The FBI, under its Library Awareness Program, insisted that crucial national secrets were leaking out of the country and into the hands of The Enemy.
The American Library Association has consistently resisted the program from the time of the FBI’s first visit to New York City’s Columbia University in 1987. Librarians just refused to cooperate. Fortunately for the rest of us, libraries and librarians may prove to be among the most crucial agents of a healthy and free society.
