Slashdot Mirror
Library Chief Criticized for Requiring Subpoena
sudnshok writes "Hasbrouck Heights (NJ) Library Director Michele Reutty is under fire for refusing to give police library circulation records without a subpoena. Her lawyer explained, 'Reutty did the right thing... At no time did Michele Reutty say to any police officer or anybody else that she would not give the information if it was properly requested.' However, borough labor lawyer Ellen Horn, who also represented the library trustees, said Reutty was 'more interested in protecting' her library than helping the police. 'It was an absolute misjudgment of the seriousness of the matter,' Horn said."
In September, I ran the datacenter in the Houston Astrodome during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The organization I was working for (a large international organization that provides relief in disasters, hint hint) keeps data on the people who seek help private. In fact, that's their mantra. I received visits from no less than FOUR Department of Homeland Security deputies who wanted to get their hands on the refugee data, purportedly to track sexual predators. Some of these requests were polite and some were not. I've encountered similar requests within the last year for data in my corporate job as well.
It's my observation that these people will ALWAYS appeal to our base fear when they encounter barriers to getting the data they want, knowing that no one wants to aid and abet "Sexual Predators" or "Terrorists". That's why the due process laws, calling for subpoenas are in place here in the US (but for how long?) I can only hope that we can come to our senses and end this gross abuse of power. . . . Has anyone else had similar experiences? How come we never really hear much about it?
If the police were hot on a pedophile or sex offender, they would have been able to get their warrant in no time. This is a case of the police trying to be above the law and being sore because they were put in their place.
Also it's a public library, and a public place, and I would hope that a librarian would use her power to protect the public. We have a due process for a reason. Any potential "sex offender" has rights too. Innocent until proven guilty.
hell in a handbasket I tell you...
Alleged sex offender. Allegedly scoping out your child. What's stopping them from pulling YOUR library records because they don't like you, and making up some story to throw you behind bars. This dude was 23, probably was a skateboarder or something and said "lick me where I pee" but the police wants to get rid of such a trouble maker so they just pin sexual comments on him. Maybe the girl threw something at his car, or maybe she's lying. God knows 12 year olds NEVER lie. I don't see how someone's library records could possibly stop a life or death situation. You see that stupid crap in the movies all the time but that doesn't make it real. Real police work is tedious and exhaustive. It has to be that way to protect the innocent. That is what sets America apart from the rest of the world. Now if a bunch of Redneck cops want to flex on the constitution, and then COMPLAIN that the librarian didn't LET THEM? Shit, it's every citizen's duty to make sure that the constitution is followed and to speak out if it isn't. For the protection of future generations. But I forgot, only "lefties" think about the future.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
There's buttons here : https://www.ala.org/ala/oif/basics/basicrelatedlin ks/radicalbutton.htm
The phrase "Radical Militant Librarian" was used by the FBI to describe exactly this situation where somebody actually insisted on following the law.
In this drama, the police use illegal means to trap potential criminals.
None of the police are ever criticised or punished in any meaningful way for breaking the rules. The drama shows the rights of innocent people being routinely and egreiously trampled upon.
I see it as the BBC portraying what some people in government would like. No restraint on the police, no rules of evidence, no need, in fact for actual evidence -- just lock up (or better still, shoot) the people you think are the "bad guys". How many people will watch the drama and later think it is OK for the police to take such actions becasue "they have seen it on TV"?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If ANY law enforcement agency shows up and asks for anything, they had better have a warrant from a court in hand. These National Security Letters are bullshit and I wipe my ass with it after I scan and post it right here on slashdot.org, infowars.com, rense.com or whomever else would take it. Here that facist aggressor of the state. Fuck you. Yes this will drop the karma points, but I am damn tired of seeing facist police scum jackboots trying to set up a police state using secrecy and fear. I ain't scared of you people.
From the article, "But borough officials say Reutty intentionally stonewalled the police investigation by putting the library first.".
The subpeona has to be specific about what is to be seized. The librarian did what was proper.
The instrument was not license for a 'fishing expedition'. When the police returned with a more
specific instrument, she complied with the instrument.
This is how our system is supposed to work. The police were negligent OR STUPID. They ask
for subpoena's ALL the time. They should know that they need to be specific. Can you say "Keystone Cops employ Barney Fife"? Sure you can.
As stated previously, the city idiots are politicians, with NO CLUE. They were, after all, voted into office.
The inclusion of the city or Libraries lawyer, would most likely have not lead to ANY more protection to the
citizen's rights. Sadly, these same people have been around for many years, and have had the opportunity to
read newspapers that have published cases like this before. They did not read them or convienently forgot the precedents already in the law.
Pity.
Those are good points. That said, almost all those instances you mentioned required trade-off. When the slaves were freed, states lost their sovreignty. When segregation ended, the government gained the right to regulate private businesses to an insane extent. When the patriot act was scaled back, it just gave retarded neocons the right to say "See? we compromised... we gave you back some of your provisions, now let us keep some of ours!"
People can definitely regain some rights without revolution, but I think it may be impossible to regain all rights in general. The slaves, gladiators, and POWs of Rome lived more and more crappily until the Empire fell apart at the seams. The American colonies had to fight a war just to fix the tax system, which they'd fought continuously to reform for decades through the proper channels. The Berliners had to physically kick down the wall in 1991 to finally see their relatives. The people of the USSR managed to get their leaders to partially convert the Union to capitalism, which led to its fall, but their lives just got worse.
ResidntGeek
You'd think that. But in fact some of the strongest supporters of suspect rights (like reading the Miranda rights, etc.) are law enforcement associations. Why? Because (a) they actually believe in all that crazy land-of-the-free stuff and (b) they know that having (and following!) constraints on the police power helps keep them from being seen as -- and from becoming -- the Bad Guys. The positive impacts of being respected by the community, rather than feared by it, far outweigh the occasional slip in the system. Anyone who looks knows that effective policing requires community support.
There was a case in the early 1990s when the Supreme Court appeared to weaken Miranda rights (shamefully, I can't recall the case or a cite for it). Some of the most outspoken criticism came from a national association of sheriffs.
It's not about "letting criminals go". It's about having a fair and legitimate system for ascertaining who is a criminal, and it's about constraining the police power to prevent the abuse of actually innocent citizens. Or to put it more briefly, it's about that whole "innocent until proven guilty" jazz, plus that "due process of law" business.
In other words, it's basically about the meaning of America.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
On my way home from a motorcycle trip once I was stopped in Columbia, MO. The policeman had me demonstrate that all my lights worked and then told me he was going to have to search my bags. Now I had been on the road for a week, and had some funky clothes and little else in the bags. There was for sure nothing the policeman would have cared about, but I did not feel like having him dig through my dirty underwear.
I told him that he did not have my permission to search the bags, and I asked if I was being charged with anything. He told me he could have a search warrant in no time. He had been fishing with the judge just that morning.
I encouraged him to get a warrant if he wanted to search the bags.
He said it could also take a while to process the warrant, and he would have to take me to the jail to wait. I told him I was a teacher and was on summer break. A wait would just make for a better story when I got home.
I asked if I was being charged with anything.
We danced around this issue for a while. I was polite but firm. He kept telling me he was going to have to search the bags.
He never did search the bags or write me a ticket or tell me why he stopped me.
It still pisses me off.
I think the librarian should have asked for a subpoena. There are fundamental issues here, and while I don't think anyone should obstruct justice, I also don't think policemen should be able to waltz into a library and ask for circulation records. It is not that you have anything to hide, but sometimes you don't feel like having someone digging through your personal stuff.
...and there is no way in hell our library would give out ANY information about ANYONE to te police, or any justice official without a warrant first. We are not even allowed to say to a police officer if someone they are looking for is in, or has been in the library.
In saying this, I am in New Zealand, where people actually care about privacy laws.
The freedom to read what you want to read is a powerful freedom indeed. If the police can walk up to the library and get a list of books you've checked out, they might discover all kinds of dirty (but perfectly) legal facts about you--e.g. that you're gay or at the very least gay-sympathetic. They can then use this information against you, officially or unofficially, in the social or political arena. Having to think twice every time you check out a book is a very big lost of freedom indeed--it's a potential curtailment of knowledge.
...but first, they must get a warrant, and to do that they must show that they have reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Privacy in general IS a rather huge freedom, and I really wish the constitution framers had made it explicit. A little-realized fact is that they were against the Bill of Rights in the beginning--not because they were against the rights it protected, but because they did not want to give the impression that it guaranteed ONLY those rights and no others. Unfortunately, that is the impression most Americans have today. Sophisticated and all-encompassing recordkeeping and surveillence didn't exist in the 1700s; the right to privacy was really rather a given. If they had realized the comming law enforcement revolutions, I'm sure they would have made it explict. As it is, the right to privacy must be protected under the "all other rights are reserved by the people, or by the states" clause. The courts and legislatures haven't been perfect about protecting this right, but the Patriot Act notwithstanding, it's still there at least a little bit.
It is very much in the spirit of the constitution to protect privacy. The police have no business gathering ANY of my private information whatsoever until they have obtained a warrant. Sheep like you always seem to forget that part--no one's arguing that they don't have a right to the library records. By all means, if they need it they should get it!
Asshats like you are saying that they should have the power to search my private information even without reasonable suspicion. Please justify that to me. Please tell me why I should have to explain myself when a police officer comes to my door, asking why I checked out Mein Kampf or The Anarchist's Cookbook. Unless he suspects me of a crime, it's none of his fucking business what I read or why. Yet, he could very easily use such information against me if he wanted to make my life difficult. POLICE SHOULD NOT HAVE SUCH POWER OVER LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS. You want to check up on my internet surfing habits, my reading habits, my phone calls, my porn collection, etc.? Fine, be my guess! You just have to have a good REASON first. It doesn't have to be ironclad; to get a warrant you just need a bit of a motive and/or a bit of circumstancial evidence. What you're asking for is the ability for LEAs to go fishing, trolling for petty criminals with absolutely no reasonable suspicion--but realize, they'll only do this amongst people they didn't like to begin with--the niggers, the spics, the liberals, etc. And like I said, even when they don't find evidence of wrongdoing they can still often wind up with damaging information.
I'm a law-abiding citizen, but I know I've checked out several books that, if commonly known (and correlated with certain facts reguarding my public life), might give me problems if I ever chose to run for office. What if I was an opponent of the local sheriff? Well, if this kind of shit were legal it would be a pretty simple matter for him to get my library records and let it slip to the local newspaper via an "anonymous source"...
So, there's your explanation, oh Anonymous Coward who claims to not see the usefulness of anonymity. It's given you the ability to attack me without losing karma or being added to anyone's foe list, hasn't it? Freedom to gain and share information is extremely sacred indeed, and if I may say so you are extremely anti-American (I'm going to continue to use the word American like it still stands for freedom. Who knows, maybe it will again... one day) for trying to deny that freedom.
Here in the UK, my sister, who is a librarian, is often asked for customers' data by the police. Usually for sensible reasons, e.g. they found a handbag with a library book in it and want to find the owner. However, she has had it made clear to her by her bosses that it is completely illegal to give such information out without a warrent - the data protection act simply doesn't allow it. She always finds it amusing to be having to explain to the police what the law is!
Pining for the fjords
And one way you keep seeing it cutting the other way is providing an endless stream of ammo for those in power to use as justification for their getting more power. Any crime or problem can be presented as a nation-sweeping epidemic, that demands immediate action, if the public is just bombarded with just enough examples of it happening.
The problem, as I've been saying before is that human brains functions sorta like that of Terry Prattchett's trolls, whose counting went something like "one, two, many, lots". People simply lose sense of proportion beyond a certain scale. A week, a month, or a year, or even ten years, you can put into an intuitive proportion. A billion years, you can't. Or 10, 100 or 1000 people you can see every day. A billion people becomes just a very large number. "Lots." You may be able to work maths with 1,000,000,000 or 10^9, but your intuition won't help you.
Hence bombarding people with stuff that happened over such huge, unintuitive areas and numbers of people can be a very dangerous thing. The fact that it was a one in a million or one in a billion case just gets lost, and all those cases are treated as if they all happened in a world barely larger than their home town.
E.g., if you heard that one gamer in your home town preferred to play EQ until he lost his job, his house and everything, you think "heh. What a loser." But when you get bombarded with thousands of examples of that happening, it suddenly becomes "whoa! It's a dangerous addiction! It's a wave sweeping the nation!" Why? Because your brain doesn't have the intuitive framework to put it in the right proportion: that it's one in a million cases. But your intuition acts as if they all happened within a mile of your home.
E.g., if you heard that someone raped a child in your home town, you're disgusted, shocked, etc, but in the end, eh, it's one insane person. But get bombarded with cases from all over the world, and evidence that it happens every day, and suddenly it starts seeming like every other adult male is getting a hard-on at pre-teens. Why? Again, because it's not put in the right proportion. It's compared to a vague "Lots" number that's just marginally larger than the male population you see in a day.
And so on.
And while, yes, on one hand it does serve to also amplify the perceived extent of the abuses of power, it also works the other way, giving those in power ammo to keep people scared and justify getting more power. Yes, some citizens might be genuinely mistaken and concerned about the extent of police abuses. But on the other hand, there'll also be a bunch of ruthless politicians understanding this phenomenon and milking it for everything its got.
And frankly, the latter worries me more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I hear you there, and in all honesty I have a hard time answering that one. I know this makes me a tool of the man and all that, but I want criminals brought to justice, and I'm not without sympathy for law enforcement. In an ideal world, there would be no tension between our fourth amendment rights and law enforcement's capacity to convict criminals, but there'd be no intentional fouls in basketball either.
I guess I expect the police to be interested in gathering evidence that criminals would like to keep from them, and I assume that motive will inspire a certain amount of infringement. I feel secure enough in my rights without the police making a priority of them, though; in domestic criminal cases, our privacy rights are secured at the prosecution stage more than at the evidence gathering stage - the penalty for violations by law enforcement being the exclusion of the evidence in question.
Now I have a hard time seeing the value of a suspect's library records in the prosecution of a crime, but hey, if the police want to chase that line, fine with me. I don't expect them to get subpoenas and warrants in advance for every bit of evidence they want to gather; I expect them to do this only when they encounter obstacles or are on territory where the evidence would spoil without a warrant.
This story interested me because I'm more worried about trustees of our private data being loose with it. Police have always sought to uncover data with exceptional eagerness. The library director's actions show exactly the respect for privacy that I want to see, so I'm happy.
Now wanna know what *really* scares me? How about the *first amendment* rights we're losing for the sake of something as frivolous as the entertainment industry's right not to innovate?
Pi Ran Out
If this is happening in a city this size, I can only imagine the greed and underhandedness that happens in larger cities. This country needs to wake up, and the general population needs a few more IQ points to boot.
"I'd say the police have as much right as anyone else to question him (assuming no crime was committed). "WTF did you think you were doing?" sort of thing. Social pressure is an important part of the social glue that keeps society together."
You are SOOO right, this is why I am glad that the police stopped my vehicle, put me in handcuffs in the back of a police car and then searched my car thoroughly for 30 minutes while repeatedly asking me where "the dope was hidden".
Apparently (the cop told me) I was not supposed to be on that side of town and asked me what I was doing there (the answer, visiting a friend who lived in the neighborhood).
Luckily he let me off with a warning and made sure to let me know that "I owed him one for letting me go".
I'm glad we have police who are willing to go the extra mile and question people who don't behave the way the police believe they should behave, or visit places deemed "appropriate".
(true story).