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News :: Civil & Human Rights |
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American Library Association Responds To Attorney General Remarks On Librarians And USA PATRIOT Act |
Current rating: 0 |
by via ML
(No verified email address) |
17 Sep 2003
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"Attorney General John Ashcroft today accused the country's biggest library association and other critics of fueling "baseless hysteria" (http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2003/091503nationalrestaurant.htm)
about the government's ability to pry into the public's reading habits."
The ALA responded to Ashcroft's own baseless accusation of "hysteria" with the following statement: |
A statement by ALA President Carla Hayden
(Chicago) The American Library Association (ALA) has worked diligently for the past two years to increase awareness of a very complicated law – the USA PATRIOT Act – that was pushed through the legislative process at breakneck speed in the wake of a national tragedy. Because the Department of Justice has refused our requests for information about how many libraries have been visited by law enforcement officials using these new powers, we have focused on what the law allows. The PATRIOT Act gives law enforcement unprecedented powers of surveillance – including easy access to library records with minimal judicial oversight.
Among the many changes in U.S. law and practice enabled by the act is the federal government’s ability to override the historical protections of library reading records that exist in every state. States created these confidentiality laws to protect the privacy and freedoms Americans hold dear. These laws provide a clear framework for responding to national security concerns while safeguarding against random searches, fishing expeditions or invasions of privacy.
Librarians are committed to ensuring the highest quality library service and protection of our patrons’ records. This commitment is why we are among the most trusted members of our communities, from Maine to California. We take great pains to be educated about the federal and state laws that govern our ability to serve our communities – which is why we’re so concerned.
Over the past two years, Americans have been told that only individuals directly involved in terrorism need be concerned. This is not what the law says. The act lowers the legal standard to “simple relevance” rather than the higher standard of “probable cause” required by the Fourth Amendment.
In March 2003, the Justice Department said that libraries had become a logical target of surveillance. Which assurance by Mark Corallo are we to believe?
We also have been told that the law only affects non-U.S. citizens. This is not what the law says. In fact, the act amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in such a way that U.S. citizens may now be investigated under the lowered legal standards applied to foreign agents.
And now Attorney General John Ashcroft says the FBI has no interest in Americans’ reading records. While this may be true, librarians have a history with law enforcement dating back to the McCarthy era that gives us pause. For decades, and as late as the 1980s, the FBI’s Library Awareness Program sought information on the reading habits of people from “hostile foreign countries,” as well as U.S. citizens who held unpopular political views.
We are deeply concerned that the Attorney General should be so openly contemptuous of those who seek to defend our Constitution. Rather than ask the nations’ librarians and Americans nationwide to “just trust him,” Ashcroft could allay concerns by releasing aggregate information about the number of libraries visited using the expanded powers created by the USA PATRIOT Act.
Or, better yet, federal elected officials could vote – as several U.S. senators and representatives from across the political spectrum have proposed – to restore the historical protection of library records.
For more information, please visit www.ala.org/oif/ifissues/usapatriotact |
See also:
http://www.ala.org
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Government Says It Has Yet To Use New Power To Check Library Records |
by Eric Lichtblau
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
19 Sep 2003
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ASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — After months of increasingly noisy protests, fears of Big Brother run amok and government warnings about needless "hysteria," the Justice Department gave its first public accounting today of how many times it had used its newfound counterterrorism powers to demand records from libraries and elsewhere.
The answer is zero.
Department officials and their supporters pointed to the goose egg as evidence that the raging public debate over the government's expanded powers has been much ado about nothing. In this case, they argued, public fear and mistrust of government appear to have outpaced the reality of what federal agents are actually doing.
But the disclosure by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who said he grudgingly agreed to declassify the data on demands for library records to counter "misinformation," is unlikely to end the debate soon.
Mr. Ashcroft's opponents said they remained deeply concerned over the government's far-reaching powers under the legislation, the USA Patriot Act, and they said the Justice Department added to public fears by maintaining such tight secrecy over its activities.
"If the Justice Department had been more forthcoming with the public," said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association, "this high level of suspicion wouldn't have developed. But they've been fighting for two years not to tell people what they were doing, and that left a lot of people wondering what they had to hide."
Moreover, critics said, Mr. Ashcroft's report raised another question: If the F.B.I. has never actually used its power to demand records from libraries, bookstores and other institutions in pursuit of terrorists, why does it need the authority at all?
Mr. Ashcroft's opponents said his report gave them new ammunition to seek to scale back provisions of the law. One measure already pending in the House would exempt libraries and bookstores from having to turn over records under Section 215 of the legislation.
"Given the potential for abuse of library and bookstore records, I can see no reason why — if this authority was not needed to investigate Sept. 11 — it should stay on the books any longer," said Representative John Conyers Jr., ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, scoffed at the idea that the department's power to examine library records should be repealed simply because investigators had not had to use it yet.
"The same people who would argue that," Mr. Corallo said, "would argue that if a police officer has never had to fire his weapon in 20 years on the force, we should take his weapon away from him because he'll never have to use it."
The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, gave federal authorities the power in national security cases to seek an order from a secret court allowing them to demand library records, business documents, medical files and a variety of other records that might be relevant to an investigation.
That power, more than any other part of the act, has galvanized opposition to the law from civil rights advocates, library associations, community groups and others.
At this month's Democratic presidential debate in Baltimore, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina said Americans should not have to relinquish their privacy rights to Mr. Ashcroft, and the senator said he was troubled by the notion that F.B.I. agents "are going to libraries to find out what books people are checking out, going to bookstores to find out what books are being purchased."
In speeches nationwide, Mr. Ashcroft has mounted an aggressive defense of the legislation, speaking forcefully today in Memphis against the "hysteria" that he said had led some Americans to believe that "your local public library is under siege by the F.B.I."
But he also acknowledged that the decision to declassify the library information reflected the department's inability to tilt that debate in its favor.
In a memorandum to Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., Mr. Ashcroft said he believed it was "generally not in the interest of the United States" to release such classified information.
But he added that "to date we have not been able to counter the troubling amount of public distortion and misinformation in connection with Section 215."
David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and frequent critic of the Justice Department on civil rights issues, said that although the government did not appear to have seized any library records under the Patriot Act, the law had had "a substantial chilling effect."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com |
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For Those Who Wish To Dissent: Speech, Silence And Patriotism |
by Sara Paretsky
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
21 Sep 2003
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A cloud of unknowing surrounds St. Johns College in Santa Fe, Andrew O'Connor and his long interrogation by Albuquerque police and the Secret Service in February 2003. O'Connor was removed from the college library by police after he made negative comments about President Bush in an online chat room. But since he was ultimately released without being charged, he clearly had not threatened the president's life. What he said, how the police and Secret Service knew he said it, and the gag order on the college to keep people from talking about his arrest, are all shrouded in silence.
Similarly, we don't know what a New Jersey library user was reading the day another patron called the police to report that the man was looking at a foreign-language Web page. But the man was hauled off for questioning, held without being allowed to call his home or a lawyer, and then released without being charged. We also don't know why the FBI arrived at a California student's home hours after she talked on the phone about bomb icons in a video game she was playing.
The only thing we do know is that all these acts by police and FBI are legal under the USA Patriot Act. A few years ago, I was almost arrested in the middle of the night. The police stopped a hit man just before he reached his target. The hit man had a card with my name and the title of one of my books on the seat next to him, and the police were sure I was involved. But they had to get a warrant, and the assistant state's attorney wouldn't issue it. Today, though, the cops could just come and get me. And U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft thinks that's fine.
In fact, as Ashcroft has taken his dog-and-pony show on the road, he's been saying that not only is it good for the police to arrest me, or library patrons, or college students, without needing to show probable cause, they should have even more power. They should be able to search all our records, and to hold us without bail when they do arrest us. He says those of us objecting are "raising the phantom of lost liberty," and we're giving "ammunition to America's enemies."
I grew up in Kansas during the shadow of the Cold War, when religion and patriotism were conflated and we attended daylong revivals of religion and daylong lectures on patriotism. The local paper pilloried my parents for questioning the revivals, printing their phone number and urging readers to call them-- which happened for some months, usually in the middle of the night. A popular high school teacher had to resign because he was doing a PhD in Russian history--and only a communist would study Russia. In the larger society, Martin Luther King Jr. was hounded with lies claiming he was a communist, and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote "The Maltese Falcon," spent six months in prison for refusing to name names to the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Hammett's publishers even bowed to pressure from the House and briefly took his books out of print.
These days, the chill-silencing winds of my childhood are starting to blow at gale force again. I am a frightened citizen right now, more scared than I've been since the first few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. The situation in post-war Iraq seems to be creating, not eliminating, new sources of terror, while the nation's worst blackout on Aug. 14 shows how vulnerable we are. And Ashcroft's response is to say that any questions about his policies, any questions about governmental lies, secrets or silences, is tantamount to treason.
When I started writing my most recent book, "Blacklist," it was under the shadow of the attack on the Twin Towers. I started writing it soon after Sept. 11--maybe too soon, when I was still feeling numbed and shocked. I started with my detective, V.I. Warshawski, in that state--it was the only way I could write, by having her express the reality of my feelings--the feelings we all had two years ago. During the 18 months it took me to write the book, the powers of the Patriot Act and the actions of the U.S. attorney general began frightening me almost as much as Al Qaeda.
Silence and speech are the hallmarks of my work: who can speak, what can they say, who will listen to them? In "Blacklist," V.I. gets penned into a smaller and smaller space by an array of business and political leaders who call on the power of the Patriot Act to silence her. She finally figures out a strategy to wriggle out of danger. But in the real world today, I don't know how someone would evade the police and political forces V.I. faces--I don't know how I would.
I think of Patrick Henry's cry to the Burgesses, "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" and William Lloyd Garrison's cry to slavery forces, "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." I don't want ever to face the choice the U.S. Congress gave Dashiell Hammett: choose between prison and betraying my friends. I don't want to be pilloried in the papers, as my parents were, or have my books blacklisted. But even more, I hope if I am put to the test for my beliefs, I will be strong enough to stand with our true patriots, with Patrick Henry and William Lloyd Garrison, with Dashiell Hammett--and my parents.
Sara Paretsky is a mystery novelist
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/ |
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