Librarians Under Siege

It used to be a matter of flashing a badge and appealing to patriotism, but these days federal agents are finding it a little harder to get librarians to spy. Under an obscure provision of the USA Patriot Act, federal agents can obtain a warrant to acquire information about library users. According to a recent survey, agents have been showing up at libraries--a lot--asking librarians for reading records. Nearly everything about the procedure--from the granting of the warrants to the search itself--is secret (as an excellent story in the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out recently). But, unlike in the cold war years, when the FBI last tried to conduct such library surveillance, this time around, top librarians are on the warpath to protect reader privacy. And Congress wants Attorney General John Ashcroft to account for his agents' library conduct.

It wasn't like this back in George W.'s daddy's day.

Between 1973 and the late 1980s, the FBI operated a secret counterintelligence operation called the Library Awareness Program. Back then the Feds were particularly concerned about what Soviet bloc citizens were reading in the nation's premier science libraries. In the words of Herbert Foerstel, a science librarian in those years, "Agents would approach clerical staff at public and university libraries, flash a badge and appeal to their patriotism in preventing the spread of 'sensitive but unclassified' information."

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