« U.S. House Votes to Revise U.S. Patriot Act | Main | A Failed Wiki Experiment »
June 20, 2005
ALA Study of Government Inquiries to Libraries (More on the Patriot Act)
The New York Times today reports in an article about a new study conducted and just released by the American Library Association which gathers statistics about inquiries by government officials to libraries related to the government's counterterrorism activities. (As of this morning, I could not find a link to the study itself on the association's web site.)
According to the article, "the study does not directly answer how or whether the Patriot Act has been used to search libraries. The association said it decided it was constrained from asking direct questions on the law because of secrecy provisions that could make it a crime for a librarian to respond. Federal intelligence law bans those who receive certain types of demands for records from challenging the order or even telling anyone they have received it." [Tim's comment: Check out that last sentence--in some cases libraries not only cannot challenge the demand for information, they cannot reveal that they received it! That is scary, folks. The government could very well ask what you checked out or read, we would have to tell them, and we would be prevented from telling you that they asked about you.]
The survey included 1,500 public libraries and 4,000 academic libraries, most of which had not received any inquiries. But from those who did, extrapolated to 500 libraries, there would have been about 600 requests for information.
Bush Administration officials said they had not yet seen the details of the study but proceeded to denounce it anyway.
Posted by tdr at June 20, 2005 09:36 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.case.edu/tdr/mt-tb.cgi/1620