IT'S HAPPENING! LIBRARIES VS. THE FBI

Remember that gag order on bookstores and libraries that scared everybody witless back in February (see #303)?

Well, it's here, quietly being enforced, and if nothing is done to stop it, I bet we're going to see a lot of libraries dumping records by the ton very soon.

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that "the FBI is visiting libraries nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack."

I love that word "visiting" - "ransacked" would be a better term.

Of course the FBI has been trying to get libraries to give up records for years, so this part is nothing new. In the past - as in the '50s and '60s, when the FBI found all those Communists hiding in the stacks - the press made such a stink about this clear abuse of Constitutional protections that the FBI stopped the practice (or said it did) by the '70s.

But now we have the USA Patriot Act, which gives FBI agents sweeping new powers to "demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in 'international terrorism' or 'clandestine activities,' " as Nat Hentoff wrote in the Village Voice.

And, even worse, the gag order: Not only are librarians required to give up these records, they are prohibited from talking to the press about it. "We've heard from them [the FBI] and that's all I can tell you," a library director in Florida told the AP in yesterday's story.

One suburban library in Chicago was "visited" by the FBI but had no record of the person being investigated. Why that library? "Federal prosecutors allege Global Relief Foundation, an Islamic charity based in the Chicago suburb, has ties to Osama bin Laden's terror network."

And why libraries in Florida? Why, a lot of the 9/11 hijackers took flying lessons there. Phoenix and San Diego libraries are surely next, if they haven't been hit already.

How many libraries have been "visited?" The University of Illinois conducted a survey in February and concluded that "85 libraries had been asked by federal or local law enforcement officers for information about patrons related to Sept. 11," the AP reports. By now the number must be far higher.