Armed with the Patriot Act (what a wonderfully Orwellian name) signed by Dubya last October, the FBI begins scouring libraries to check “terrorist” reading habits. Good news for your local Barnes and Noble, I suppose, who’ll probably be selling a lot more copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook from now herein. I’d love to see a sample list of what books make the FBI’s red flag list.
3 thoughts on “Card-carrying members of the public library.”
Comments are closed.
Gah, that’s such crap. It reminds me of that awful Mel Gibson movie — Conspiracy Theory, I believe it was called. Just you wait… There won’t be any civil liberties or privacy left for any of us, law-abiding Americans or not. It would made me inordinately happy if some library along the way either refuses to share their records, or if their records are accidentally… erased.
I’d be interested to hear what the Superior Court would have to say about this Patriot Act…
Ummm, bookstores have been getting subpoenaed even before 9/11. The Feds can apparently ask them for the personal info of anyone buying particular titles — such as those useful to meth lab operations. My favorite touch is that the bookstore employees then get an automatic gag order making it impossible for them to discuss the case. The Tattered Cover in Denver is the most famous case. So your privacy is no safer at Barnes and Noble or Amazon, unless you pay cash and wear a bag over your head whenever you buy a book.
Good point, Troutgirl. I’d forgotten that Ken Starr had subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky’s book receipts in Washington as well (apparently, she was reading [gasp!] Nicholson Baker’s Vox.)