Librarians As the First Line of Privacy Defense

The Guardian features a look at the influence of librarians in the evolving fight for various of the liberties that here on Slashdot we group together as Your Rights Online. The article points out that the evolution of libraries from book repositiories to more general centers for information technology means that librarians have been pressured in many small ways to give up their patrons' privacy, and have (at least often) successfully resisted that pressure, including some from the NSA. A small slice: The first politician to discover the danger of underestimating what happens when you have thousands of librarians on your case was attorney general John Ashcroft who, in 2003, accused the American Library Association of “baseless hysteria” and ridiculed their protests against the Patriot Act. ... US libraries were once protected from blanket requests for records of what their patrons were reading or viewing online, but the legislation rushed through after after 9/11 threatened to wreck this tradition of confidentiality in ways that presaged later discoveries of bulk telephone and internet record collection."

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More on the Connecticut Four

[Dupple]

This is from about a month ago

http://www.thenation.com/artic...

National Security Letters

[Lennie]

Librarians where also among the first to fight the National Security Letters:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/con...

Re:We're fucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Some librarians may understand privacy, but most of them are completely clueless about technology.

It depends. I'm the primary systems admin for an academic library on a very large university campus, and in many cases our librarians are at the vanguard of pointing out privacy issues as they relate to technology. They're not DevOps ninjas backflipping over Happy Hacking keyboards while coding in the night, but they know what's up.