From the Village Voice:
A drive is under way to gather a million signatures by May 4 in support of bills in Congress to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. The bills seek to restore the privacy safeguards in the Constitution that John Ashcroft eliminated by giving the FBI the power to get bookstore and library records through the compliant secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, without informing readers, book buyers, the press, or anyone else.
Harvesting these protesting signatures are 40 organizations and 81 individual companies, including libraries, bookstores, book publishers, as well as writers, and other ardent advocates of everyone’s freedom to read …
So far as I know, in this congregation of freedom-to-read activists, not one on the list—except for PEN—has said or done anything about the torment that 10 independent librarians in Cuba are undergoing in Fidel Castro’s gulag, along with 65 other pro-democracy dissidents rounded up in the dictator’s crackdown in April last year.
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