U.S. librarians say they have been asked at least 268 times since 2001 to give law officers data about readers, despite repeated Justice Department denials that it is interested in patrons’ reading habits.
A survey released this week by the American Library Association found the inquiries from law enforcement came formally and informally — that is, without a formal legal order — to public and academic libraries. That is despite laws in 48 states and prevailing opinion in the other two that library information is private.
“Now we have solid information that no matter what the Justice Department is saying, they are interested in libraries because they are coming, and not once or twice, but in appreciable numbers,” Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the library association’s Washington office, said on Tuesday.
‘An expectation of privacy’
“There is an expectation of privacy when you walk into a library,” she said in a telephone interview after the survey’s release.
Sheketoff said it was unclear how many law-enforcement requests were made under the Patriot Act, the sweeping investigative tool passed soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
She noted that current and former U.S. attorneys general, as recently as April, have denied using the Patriot Act to target library records. But whether under the Patriot Act or some other authority, she said the requests kept coming.
The House of Representatives last week defied President Bush by approving a measure that would make it harder to secretly gather information on people’s library reading habits or bookstore purchases. The Senate has not yet debated its version of the bill.
Kevin Madden, a Justice Department spokesman said the library survey was not a comprehensive or comparative study of law-enforcement inquiries, and did not say which type of law enforcement — local, state or federal — made the request.
“The federal government is not interested in the reading habits of everyday Americans,” Madden said. “Any conclusion that there is extraordinary interest is wholly manufactured as a result of misinformation.”
Concerns of ‘fishing expeditions’
Sheketoff called for proper oversight to prevent what she called “fishing expeditions” at U.S. libraries.
One such expedition occurred at a library in Whatcom County in Washington state, Sheketoff said, when a library patron noticed a handwritten notation in the margin of a biography of Osama bin Laden and reported it to the FBI.
The note, dealing with hostility toward Americans, was found to be an often-cited quotation from bin Laden that was included in the report of the Sept. 11 commission investigating U.S. response to the attacks.
The FBI reacted by seeking the names and information on all those who had checked out the book since 2001, but the library’s board challenged the request and it was later withdrawn, Sheketoff said.
“You have to have a reason to believe that the information is necessary for some investigation and there has to be some specificity,” she said. “Just because I read murder mysteries, that doesn’t make me a murderer ... and if somebody reads a book on Osama bin Laden, that doesn’t make him a member of al-Qaida.”
