Guest AuthorDuring the Cold War there was a rumor that when you went to the library and checked out “Mein Kampf” or the “Communist Manifesto,” you would be placed on the FBI’s watch list.
In 1987, a Columbia University librarian revealed that the rumor was fact. She shocked the nation when she exposed the FBI’s “Library Awareness Program.”
The FBI program circumvented subpoenas and court orders by recruiting librarians to spy on patrons and report them to the bureau. The New York Times reported that the program operated secretly for more than a decade.
Paula Kaufman, the university librarian, spoke out and her words 25 years ago ring true today:
”It seems to me that our society faces a far greater threat from the loss of our basic rights of privacy…Any threat to our national security which results from the exercise of these rights is the necessary price we must pay to remain a free and open democratic society.”
Library-gate faded with the end of the Cold War in 1989. Thirteen years later, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act became law. The law includes the “library records” provision, which gives the government power to seize library and bookstore records while muzzling librarians and booksellers with gag orders.
Civil libertarians feared that the provision gave the government too much power and would eventually limit citizens’ freedom of speech.
This fear was proven valid after revelations that the NSA is collecting our personal emails, texts and phone calls. When you add the Justice Department’s wire-tapping of news organizations and companies like Google, Verizon, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon handing our profiles over to the government, it’s easy to conclude that we’re a surveillance state.
This invasion of our privacy will, in fact, limit our free speech.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan interviewed Nat Hentoff, a civil libertarian, on the consequences of a surveillance state. In the column, What We Lose If We Give Up Privacy, Hentoff warned, “Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.”
Self-censorship undermines the Bill of Rights, which our Founders drafted specifically to curb the power of the federal government. As it turns out, the library records provision has given our government the green light to bypass the First, Fourth and Fifth amendment protections. These abuses of power are then affirmed in secret courts.
To protect our civil liberties, we must change the library records provision. We must restore libraries as a place for quiet enlightenment and not a vehicle for quieting our opinions.
Andrew Carnegie, who built over 3,500 libraries, said, “There’s not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”
I think I’m going to get a library card to ensure I don’t remain quiet in our fight against tyranny.
