Madame Librarian: Defending terrorists' privacy while ignoring real repression.

Section 215, most famous for the alleged threat it poses to library patrons ... doesn't single out libraries but relates to official requests for "... books, records, ... etc.". The provision is not known to have been invoked yet ....

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.

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.

From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Judith_Krug comes this:

When the names and photographs were first released, Kathleen Hensman, a public librarian in Delray Beach, Fla., recognized some of the suspected hijackers in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as men who had used the computers in her small library. She immediately called the police. That broke a Florida law that guarantees confidentiality to library patrons. It also violated a cardinal principle of librarians never to tell the police, in absence of a court order, about who uses their rooms and what books they check out. But almost no one thinks Ms. Hensman did the wrong thing. .... Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's office of intellectual freedom, said, "I would have felt better if she had followed the Florida law."
- "A Nation Challenged: Questions of Confidentiality; Competing Principles Leave Some Professionals Debating Responsibility to Government," by David E. Rosenbaum, The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2001. Alternate source.

I know what this means to me. What does this mean to all of you?

SafeLibraries.org - Are Children Safe in Public Libraries?

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