PATRIOT ACT: ASHCROFT DISMISSES LIBRARIANS AS "HYSTERICAL."

In a speech on Monday the Attorney General ridiculed the concerns of librarians. "Do we at the Justice Department care what you are reading? No!" he scoffed. "People are being led to believe FBI agents dressed in trench coats are surrounding libraries." Librarians get pretty testy when government officials make light of free speech. So why did they put language in the Patriot Act giving Federal authorities the right to access library records, the librarians want to know? In Maryland, as in 38 other states, library circulation records are treated as confidential, and federal authorities must have a search warrant to get at records. They'd better hurry, librarians around the country are shredding circulation records. Seeking to calm the furor, the Department of Justice released an accounting showing the library records provision of the Patriot Act had not been used a single time. Bad mistake. So why, the librarians demanded to know, does the Justice Department need this authority if it's not going to use it. Librarians are a lot tougher than they look.

But, according to Ashcroft, awfully easy to dupe, as this entry on the American Library Association website attests:

In a week of escalating controversy and heightened rhetoric surrounding the USA Patriot Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed that the Justice Department has never used the provision of the law that allows it to seek records from libraries and bookstores.

“The number of times Section 215 has been used to date is zero,” Ashcroft wrote in a memo to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. Ashcroft said he had decided to declassify the previously secret information “to counter the troubling amount of public distortion and misinformation in connection with Section 215,” the Washington Post reported September 18.

Ashcroft also placed a telephone call to American Library Association President Carla Hayden in which he said people have misunderstood his commitment to civil liberties and promised to declassify the Justice Department’s report on the use of Section 215.

The call to Hayden followed a September 15 speech at the National Restaurant Association conference in Washington, D.C., in which Ashcroft accused ALA and other administration critics of fueling “baseless hysteria” about the government’s use of the Patriot Act to pry into the public’s reading habits. Ashcroft mocked ALA for believing that “the FBI is not fighting terrorism. Instead, agents are checking how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.”

The Association fired off a prompt and strong response to the attack. “We are deeply concerned that the Attorney General should be so openly contemptuous of those who seek to defend our Constitution,” said Hayden. “Rather than ask the nations’ librarians and Americans nationwide to ‘just trust him,’ Ashcroft could allay concerns by releasing aggregate information about the number of libraries visited using the expanded powers created by the USA Patriot Act.”

[...]


Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, told the Times that the speech was intended not as an attack on librarians but on such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and politicians who had persuaded librarians to mistrust the government. He claimed ALA “has been somewhat duped by those who are ideologically opposed to the Patriot Act,” adding that Ashcroft’s remarks “should be seen as a jab at those who would mislead librarians and the general public into believing the absurd, that the FBI is running around monitoring libraries instead of going after terrorists.”

[...]

Hayden expressed ALA’s surprise at learning that agents had never utilized Section 215, citing previous statements from the Justice Department: In March, Corallo said libraries had become a logical target of surveillance, and in May Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh testified before members of Congress that federal agents had visited about 50 libraries; the department later clarified that Dinh was referring to ordinary criminal cases rather than national security cases.

Oh -- that makes it alright, I guess.

I once, very briefly, contemplated a career as a librarian, being a lover of books and a library aide in school and at the local public library, so I certainly appreciate librarians taking a strong and principled stand in favor of our basic civil liberties.