Librarians win Patriot Act showdown

April 13, 2006

In 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft described concerns over the government snooping into libraries, using the Patriot Act, as paranoid hysteria. “The law enforcement community has no interest in your reading habits,” Ashcroft said.

Around the same time, several libraries received secret subpoenas from the federal government for internal records, and insisted they had to keep the requests secret. Yesterday, they became a little less confidential.

After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation.

The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages.

It was unclear what impact the government’s decision would have on the approximately 30,000 other such letters that are issued each year.

It strikes me as odd that the Justice Department would argue that the Patriot Act trumps the First Amendment, but then again, it’s Bush’s America — and nothing is all that surprising.

NO law can “trump” any part of the Constitution–that’s Government 101. Let’s see these guys try and put an amendment through restricting our rights; it’ll be the death knell of the Republicant leadership.

  • Actually, I think every right in the constitution is subject to reasonable restrictions.

    For instance, Judges can put gag orders on lawyers and defendents of criminal and civil proceedings. I doubt you’d find a court in this country that would reverse a reasoned gag order.

    These national security letters are part of possible investigations of criminal, terrorist or espionage investigations. There has to be some reasonable expectation of restriction of the freedom of speech of the recipiants of these letters.

    Nice to know that it does not extend to the point of not being able to say you GOT such a letter.

  • Funny thing—I don’t see the Patriot Act anywhere in the Constitution. Lots of stuff about government not intruding upon individual rights, to be sure, but nothing about those rights being subservient to government whims.

    And no—it is NOT “Bush’s America.” It only becomes “his” if we, the People, collectively give it to him. The little tramp barely came off with an election victory in 2004, and he claims “a mandate.” So long as there are people who can stand up and say with complete honesty to that pathetic excuse for a politician that “you are an incompetent thug, and are thus not MY president,” then the U.S. is not “his.” The goof’s approval rating are mid-30’s, at best; even FOX has him below 40% now. That’s like Goebbels (sp?) telling Hitler that the people are no longer behind him.

    He cannot win an election now. His party is is well on its way to becoming a permanent trainwreck—all of 218 days before the mid-terms. His administration’s relations with foreign governments is without measurable credibility; his rhetoric is repetitious and without substance; his press secretary is just a court jester now. Bluntly put—the Republikanner Reich is in its death-throes. All that remains to be seen is what the leaker-in-chief will try, as an end-game stunt, to pull his cojones out of the fire—and I can just see a mob of angry librarians, pushing him back into that fire—and throwing some of his precious oil on the flames….

  • So what books do you have to check out to be considered a terrorists?
    “Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot”? “Chain of Command”? “Worse Than Watergate”?
    What’s their criteria?

    “We have some questions for so-and-so, and why they checked out the ‘Joy of Sex’.

  • I just found out today that my local library will be getting copies of “How to Build a High-Yield Thermonuclear Device In Your Garage” and “The Idiot’s Guide to Developing VX Nerve Agent”.

  • 2Manchu—it took your library this long to get those books? We’ve had them for some time—right next to “How to Retrofit Your Amish Buggy as a Cascading Plutonium Centrifuge.”

  • “It was unclear what impact the government’s decision would have on the approximately 30,000 other such letters that are issued each year.”

    Here’s what’s most likely happening here: the federal prosecutors backed off in this case because they feared they were getting close to a court order permitting the librarian group to identify itself a as a recipient of the subpoena, which would have precedential (or at least persuasive) effect in all other cases where the secrecy clause is challenged. By rendering the legal argument moot in this case, they preserved the government’s right to gag all the other recipients of these letters.

    There are two ways of looking at this:
    1. The secrecy requirement is a paper tiger that, if a subpoena recipient fights it long enough, the government will eventually capitulate and permit the recipient to identify itself, or
    2. The government is just waiting until a case arises before a sympathetic court (probably in the Fourth Circuit or Texas) that would uphold the secrecy ruling; it then accumulates a few of these rulings and argues on that basis that the constitutionality of the secrecy requirement is “settled law.”

    My intiution is that they’re just waiting for a good test case to come along, where they expect to win. Connecticut is probably not, from the government’s view, an good place to have this battle decided.

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