If anyone is keen on stopping terrorists–well, you’re reading him. I live in Northern Virginia within a few miles of the Pentagon.
Explode anything other than the smallest nuke there, and the blast may not get me, but the fallout just might. My brother-in-law actually works for Defense in a near-by office building, and one of my nieces lives in an apartment complex just up the river from the Pentagon.
What’s more, I have a little distinction that most other library users don’t share. Suspected terrorists appear to have visited the Sherwood Hall Regional Branch within the Fairfax Count, VA, system, one of the places I go because the Alexandria system is so rotten compared to Fairfax. Communicating with terrorists elsewhere, they may even have used one of the same computers I did.
I welcome appropriate anti-terrorism measures such as increasing the flow of information between domestic law enforcement people and the CIA.
Still, I’m more than a little grouchy about the new powers that law enforcement officials have to check up on people’s reading and Internet habits even when the FBI and the rest are not looking into specifics.
I don’t just think of the suspected terrorists at my local library. I also remember the Nixon administration’s great fondness for invading its enemies’ privacy. Not to mention LBJ. What’s more, even in the Carter administration, bureaucrats outside law enforcement would at times investigate the private lives of critics.
Kudoos to the civil liberities groups for speaking out against the most recent privacy threats.
What’s ahead, now that the feds can look at library records for the fun of it? I wouldn’t want to be an Arab-American novelist researching a military novel and leaving a paper or cyber trail behind at Sherwood. Furthermore, as civil libertarians have pointed out, law enforcers will use their new powers in situations that haven’t anything to do with terrorism.
“Apparently, Attorney General Ashcroft wants to get the FBI back in the business of spying on religious and political organizations,” the Associated Press quotes Margaret Ratner, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. “That alone would be unconstitutional, but history suggests the FBI won’t stop at passive information gathering.”
The TeleRead take: Yes, the existence of a well-stocked national digital library systems means that we would have guard with special care against privacy threats. But as numerous librarians can testify, this is already an issue in an era when local branches keep detailed computerized records.
Furthermore, Phil Zimmermann, the man behind PGP encryption, has told me in the past that yes the technological means could exist to protect users’ privacy in a TeleRead-style system.
If nothing else, TeleRead could operate with technology similar to the kind envisioned for anonymous digital money.
Keep in mind, too, that just as now, people could buy books through means other than TeleRead. Up with free or at least affordable knowledge. Down with Big Brother.
