Effects of the Patriot Act on Librarians

Quaryon writes "The Patriot Act apears to have some chilling effects with respect to libraries and booksellers. An FBI agent can get a warrant, without any evidence, in order to compel a librarian to reveal lending details on a suspect. The librarian cannot tell anyone about the search, including the target of the search, and the details of how many such searches are done are not made public. Articles at SFGate News and Common Dreams give more details." We had a related Ask Slashdot a few weeks ago.

Comments

Does anyone find it ironic...

[jjh37997]

Does anyone else find it ironic that the certain government interest groups are currently running television ads that attempt to show what American life would be like if certain liberties were taken away?

One of these commericals shows a young man walking up to a clerk at a library and asking for a series of books. When he's told that those books are no longer available he's asked for his name. He becomes clearly upset and attempts to leave when he's taken away by a group of men in dark suits.Seems the futures a lot closer then anyone else suspected.

Re:Librarians, throw down your yokes!

[geigertube]

At the library I work at, your loan record is kept until your books are returned. At least from the clerks end, its impossible to retrieve that data.

However, a while back the police were able to retrieve past patron check out data from another local library system.. I think they used some sort of data recovery techinique to access the deleted records.. so there is that. :/

However, due to the PATRIOT act, and the fact that we are pissed off about it, we are now shredding the patron internet login sheets every night. So at least they won't get access to that. I think other library systems are doing this as well..

A few words of sanity

[dkh2]

As a university library employee I can tell you this.

1. Most libraries today use an online catalog (read: "database") for just about everything regarding their collections. This means that very few libraries have those old hard copy circulation records any more.
2. Libraries in general have no interest in tracking what you, I, or anybody else reads. They are interested in what people (in general) are reading, who currently has their books but, not what books each person has read in the past. Therefore, they typically have knowledge of who has the book right now, and possibly who had it last (in case Johnny cuts out all the pretty pictures and nobody notices until the next reader opens the book).

Given those two points, I and my fellow library employees have been told the following:

• All inquiries regarding patron records are to be referred to library administration.
• No information will be provided without appropriate warrants and/or court orders.
• Before any search for information begins the library has the right to have an attorney examine any/all warrants and/or court orders to determine their validity, jurisdiction, and all other aspects of legal standing.
• The library, through its attorney has the right to additional judicial ruling on potentially suspect or questionable documentation before any search begins. (Right of appeal)
• The library has the right to have its attorney present at all times when any search activities are carried out.

All of this applies even for the most classified requests under the most extreme reading of the PATRIOT act.

Thus, if you want to know what Sally has checked out right now, and your request makes it through all of these requirements there might be a chance that you'll find out without having to ask Sally directly.

If you want to know what Sally read last week (or possibly even this morning if the materials have already circulated) there's a good chance you're going to have to find Sally to ask her yourself.

Re:A few words of sanity

[namespan]

A contrasting view:

I worked as a developer in a major university library for about two years. The system I worked on only tracked requests made to borrow books through other universities, but it kept ALL of them. Your whole history. This system was used at a whole host of other libraries, including NYU, ASU, Berkely, and more.

The main system that kept track of circulation for the whole library also kept all requests to a certain point... but even after it purged, every time something was overdue, THOSE records were kept indefinitely. And it gets worse. I shouldn't have known any of this: it was outside my employee privileges, but several reference librarians kept the username and password posted on post-it notes, and being able to look up my own circulation records via telnet (or tnvt3270 or whatever it was) was way too convenient. From that point, looking up someone else's circ records was often way too interesting.... oh, and did I mention that the library used your SSN as a unique ID?

Anyway, the point is, the system saved lots of your information, and it was fairly easy to get to it. If we were counting on practices of libraries to preserve anonyminity, I wouldn't feel all that secure....

(disclaimer: I made slightly different version of this comment weeks ago, but it seemed like it bears repeating....)