Rich writes “President Bush, in his State of the Union address wants to make the Patriot Act permanent.
Here’s a
ZDNet Article. The ACLU has issued a response
Here, and you can contact your U.S. Rep and Senator
Via Visi.com“
More coverage at Nola.com, and Mercury News.
In other Patriot Act news, aljazeera Reports the Los Angeles city council has defied President George Bush and voted to back legislation that would repeal parts of the USA Patriot Act.
berkshireeagle.com reports Sixteen more Massachusetts communities are considering condemning the USA Patriot
Act. Associated Press says the Democrats battling for a U.S. Senate nomination condemned the Patriot Act that was passed in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, saying Tuesday the law was a mistake that should be scrapped.
In case you missed the speech
State of the Union highlight
The Patriot Act and Libraries
Before the Patriot Act, library records were made available in drug and mafia cases and other criminal acts. After the Patriot Act, a court order is still needed for library records, as it was before.
Our precious library records are far more at risk with our own staff, many of whom may be short term temporary student staff, passworded to update and access records of all kinds, including circulation. To flesh out my 2.5 FTE staff to run a library for 88 hours a week, I’d employ upwards of 20 students per academic year. Most of them knew more about the computer records than I did.
All major university libraries are run on the backs of minimum wage, student employees, many from foreign countries and for whom no background check is available.
Re:The Patriot Act and Libraries
“Before the Patriot Act, library records were made available in drug and mafia cases and other criminal acts. After the Patriot Act, a court order is still needed for library records, as it was before.”
This is a favorite mantra of Justice Department spokespeople, and in the strictest technical sense, true. The important differences are the type of court and level of justification needed to obtain records.
For those drug and mafia cases, requests for records had to be approved in a regular, open court. Law enforcement had to show probable cause that a crime had been committed. Notice had to be given to the person whose records were being sought so that the warrent could be challeged if appropriate — do you have the right David Jones, etc.
Under the Patriot Act’s Section 215, the FBI takes a request for business records to the FISA court — a court whose proceedings are secret and all we know publically is that they have NEVER turned down a request for records since they were instituted in 1978. All the FBI has to do is to certify that the records are sought for an intelligence investigation. (50 USC 1861). Upon this certification the FISA judge MUST issue the warrent for records.
The other problem is that Sec. 215 prohibits notification that a request has been made. Thus, an innocent “David Jones” might have his records pulled when the FBI should have been looking at a different David Jones — Remember our “no-fly lists” that routinely catch small children?
I sincerely believe that there is a difference between a student assistant giggling that you checked out “Erotica through the ages” and the FBI recording how many Noam Chomsky books you’ve read in the last year. The first leads to embarrassment, the second can lead to years of federal hounding.
The FBI has abused it’s authority before. Just take a stroll through the FBI FOIA Reading Room and ask yourself why the Quakers (American Friends Service Committee), Lucille Ball, and writer Thomas Mann were such dread security risks.
THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, according to Atty Gen. Ashcroft, up to late last year, Section 215 had NEVER been invoked to obtain library records. To me, all the more reason to either repeal this section or exempt libraries rather than keep such a potentially abusive law on the books.
Re:The Patriot Act and Libraries
I disagree. The real danger is our own home-grown sloppy access to extremely important records. It’s easier to be paranoid about something “out there” than to clean up our own back yards.