Patriot Act: Congress to Keep Law Intact
Library supporters fail to convince lawmakers to ease privacy rules of the antiterrorist law
By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2005
Library supporters are disappointed by Congress’s decision to keep, and in some cases extend, provisions of the Patriot Act, which largely ignores bipartisan calls to restore checks and balances to government power and protect the privacy of ordinary citizens.
After months of negotiations, House and Senate negotiators on November 16 reached a tentative agreement on revisions to the sweeping antiterrorism law that would allow FBI agents to permanently demand private patron information without judicial review. The law would also make it a crime—punishable by up to one year in prison—for anyone to disclose that they received a request for patron information.
“Don’t be fooled by some lawmakers spinning this bill as Patriot Act reform,” says Lisa Graves, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) legislative counsel. “The Patriot Act was bad in 2001, and despite bipartisan calls for reform, it’s still bad in 2005.” Although the American Library Association (ALA) was urging its members at press time to contact their legislators to ease the law, changes are unlikely at this stage, says ALA spokeswoman Bernadette Murphy. Congress expected to approve the revisions before Thanksgiving.
The government’s ability to permanently issue national security letters—which is essentially a subpoena of personal records—is particularly disturbing since the Washington Post, quoting unnamed sources, revealed on November 6 that the FBI issues more than 30,000 requests each year under the Patriot Act for the records of library patrons and others. Since passage of the antiterrorist law soon after the September 11 attacks, library supporters have unsuccessfully tried to pinpoint the number of times the government has demanded private patron information. First used in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, national security letters enabled government investigators to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, however, expanded those powers, allowing the FBI to seize the information of someone who’s not even connected to terrorism or any crime.
“This is a violation of our privacy,” says Emily Sheketoff, executive director of ALA’s Washington office, pointing out that federal courts in New York and Connecticut have ruled against the constitutionality of the national security letter provision of the law.
The only good news about Congress’s revision of the Patriot Act is that lawmakers voted in favor of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) legislation requiring authorization by the FBI director for anyone seeking library or bookstore records. Under the new rules, the ACLU will have a harder time trying to lift a gag order on George Christian, an employer with Library Connection, Inc., who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries. Christian, who the Post identifies publicly for the first time, was asked to hand over his library records.
