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In a speech before a congregation of law enforcement personnel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 22, 2003, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft ridiculed "some in Washington" for creating "an hysteria that local libraries are 'under siege by the FBI,' that we are rifling through the reading records of everyday Americans" (J. Ashcroft, Milwaukee speech, September 22, 2003). Nothing could be further from the truth, the Attorney General assured his invited audience. "The lives and liberties of Americans are protected by the PATRIOT Act," he claimed (J. Ashcroft, Milwaukee speech, September 22, 2003). "Everyday Americans" have nothing to be concerned about. This essay will examine the response of the American Library Association (ALA) to the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act with emphasis upon the specific sections of this voluminous legislation of most concern to the ALA. In addition, this essay will attempt to place the ALA's response to the USA PATRIOT Act in relation to the ALA's rich activist history as champions and proponents of intellectual freedom and patron confidentiality. Finally, the essay will examine the osmotic potential of the USA PATRIOT Act upon "everyday" Americans and weigh the validity of the ALA's response. ******* The Uniting and Strengthening American by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, or USA PATRIOT Act, was rushed into law "under most unusual circumstances" by the Bush Administration in the fearful aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks upon New York City's World Trade Center and the Pentagon building in Washington, DC (American Library Association [ALA], 2002). Prominent among these unusual circumstances during the legislation's relatively brief gestation in Congress was the complete lack of any public hearings (ALA, 2002). This omission skirted not only the forum for public debate, but essentially eliminated the legislative record as well, subsequently making both analysis and interpretation of the law difficult and fragmented (ALA, 2002). Signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001 the final 342-page USA PATRIOT Act remained remarkably similar to the initial proposals made of Congress by Ashcroft soon after the September 11 attacks. The Attorney General had quickly sought expanded investigative and surveillance powers to combat "domestic terrorism" from a cowed and "jittery Congress exiled from its anthrax-contaminated offices" (Chang, 2001). The final vote for passage from the House of Representatives was 356-66; the Senate, 98-1 (Chang, 2001). At its core, the USA PATRIOT Act unleashes a potentially crippling imbalance upon the checks and balances of the executive, legislative and judicial branches that form the very foundation of the American democratic system by shifting an unprecedented level of unchecked and unaccountable powers to the executive wing of the federal government (Chang, 2001). Moreover, in addition to vastly increasing the spectrum of individuals and organizations who may now be included under the umbrella definition of "terrorist", the Act legalizes and expedites such covert activities as "sneak and peek" searches (Section 213), access to private citizens' records (Section 215) and the monitoring of private citizens' Internet usage (Section 216) (Chang, 2001). It is the latter sections, 215 and 216, that have caused the ALA the most concern. As Charles Doyle, Senior Specialist for the American Law Division points out in his brief Libraries and the USA PATRIOT Act, there are no provisions in the Act "specifically directed at libraries or their patrons" (Doyle, 2003). However, due to the curiously obtuse language and vague definitions that make up the Act's sections, the definitions of "terrorism" and "terrorists" are essentially what the Act's enforcers define them to be, and therefore might readily include not only library patrons but, due to the Act's clandestine, secretive infrastructure, the libraries' forced complicity as well (Chang, 2001). The ALA's response to the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act seems less one of evolving concern and more one of lying in wait. As detailed in a January 19, 2002 memorandum prepared by the ALA's Washington office, a group of "library and university technology experts" convened by the ALA's Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) began analyzing an "unofficial" draft of the proposed legislation as soon as it became available in September, 2001 (ALA, 2002). As the memo notes, the ensuing analysis "identified three fundamental areas of concern: 1) the broad definition of 'terrorist' to include any cybercrime; 2) access to library records; and 3) use of library systems for active surveillance and wiretapping" (ALA, 2002). From this analysis, the OITP Advisory Committee, working in conjunction with representatives of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a joint public statement on October 2, 2001 which urged the preservation of civil liberties in the final draft of the legislation (ALA, 2002). ******* The ALA's record as champions and proponents of intellectual freedom and personal liberty is an impressive one, but as an activist political force one which spans only half of its 127-year history (Robbins, 1996, p.9). As the decade of the 1930s began to draw to its ominous close, a synthesis of events both domestic and international finally prompted a "hesitant" ALA leadership to "sharpen its stance on censorship and intellectual freedom" (Robbins, 1996, p.9). In 1938, Hitler's armies were rolling across Europe. In the U.S. Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was formed to investigate "subversives on the left as well as on the right" (Robbins, 1996, p.9). This darkening national and international picture, this "growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship" prompted the ALA to adopt the Library's Bill of Rights at its 1939 annual conference (Robbins, 1996, p.11). The following year, partially in response to the "rash" of bannings by Boards of Education across the country of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the increasing pressure upon libraries to follow suit, the ALA formed the Committee on Intellectual Freedom to Safeguard the Rights of Library Users to Freedom of Inquiry (mercifully shortened to the Committee on Intellectual Freedom in 1947) to advise the ALA on national policy regarding issues of censorship and repression (Robbins, 1996, pp.15-16). Through the proto-Ashcroftian era of McCarthyism and HUAC "witch hunts" of the late 1940s through the 1970s precursor to the PATRIOT Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's secret counterintelligence "Library Awareness Program", the ALA cut its activist teeth on a variety of social issues ranging from additional book bannings, book "purgings", "loyalty" oaths, racial integration and the ultimate insult, being branded as a "Red front organization" by the Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania Legion News in 1956 (Robbins, 1996, pp.90, 168-169). Placed in this context, the ALA's swift and decisive response to the USA PATRIOT Act follows as a natural link in a chain of admirably progressive social activism. The ALA followed its October, 2001 public statement with a variety of proactive "tools" for its members that ranged from the dryly informative Guidelines for Librarians on the USA PATRIOT Act released January 19, 2002 which strongly advocates staff training and consulting with local legal counsel (American Library Association [ALA], 2002) to the somewhat more humorous forms of response, such as this "technically" legal library front-desk sign: "We're sorry! Because of national-security concerns, we are unable to tell you if your Internet-surfing habits, passwords and e-mail content are being monitored by federal agents; please act appropriately" (Talbot, 2003). The ALA's position on the PATRIOT Act to date has culminated in the release of the Resolution on the USA PATRIOT Act and Related Measures that Infringe on the Rights of Library Users, adopted by the ALA Council on January 29, 2003. Exhorting the "leaders of the United States to protect and preserve the freedoms that are the foundations of our democracy", the Resolution "considers sections of the USA PATRIOT Act...a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users" and furthermore urges the U.S. Congress to:
In his September, 2003 speech in Milwaukee, Attorney General Ashcroft claimed that the "Department of Justice has neither the staffing, the time, the inclination, nor the authority to monitor the reading habits of Americans." "Everyday" Americans have nothing to fear from this Act; it is the "hysterics" in Washington who are making issues of sections such as 215 and 216 (J. Ashcroft, Milwaukee speech, September 22, 2003). Is the true purpose of the USA PATRIOT Act to, as Ashcroft purports, protect the average, law-abiding, "everyday" American? Is the ALA's response to this legislation merely that of the incorrigible agitator, the perpetual gadfly, the chronic troublemaker? In Silencing Political Dissent, her painstakingly thorough evisceration of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Center for Constitutional Rights' senior litigation attorney Nancy Chang convincingly demonstrates how this hunt for ill-defined "terrorists" can and is being expanded to suppress all questioning and opposition to the Bush administration's secretive agenda (Chang, 2002, p.98). When proposed legislation that includes a definition of "terrorist" as any person who commits any crime with a firearm "other than for monetary gain" (Electronic Privacy Information Center [EPIC], 2003) is passed into law by overwhelming Congressional approval, how quickly and how irrevocably might the lines between "law-abiding" and "terrorist" become blurred, depending upon the Act's latitude to its enforcers for increasingly subjective and fluid definitions? Chang (2002) notes, in times of crisis in America:
In the murky language of the USA PATRIOT Act, what is "everyday American" today could become "terrorist" tomorrow. Far from being "hysterical", the ALA's response to this secretive and sinister legislation is an essential and admirable component to assuring the survival of American democracy. Works Cited American Library Association, Washington Office, 2002: Guidelines for Librarians on the USA PATRIOT Act: What To Do Before, During and After a "Knock at the Door?" American Library Association, Washington Office, 2002: USA PATRIOT Act: A Summary of ALA Activities. American Library Association, 2003: Resolution on the USA PATRIOT Act and Related Measures that Infringe on the Rights of Library Users. Chang, Nancy, 2002: The USA PATRIOT Act: What's So Patriotic About Trampling on the Bill of Rights? Chang, Nancy. Silencing Political Dissent. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002. Doyle, Charles, (2003): CRS Report for Congress: Libraries and the USA PATRIOT Act. Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2003: The USA PATRIOT Act. Robbins, L.S. Censorship and the American Library. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. Talbot, M. "Subversive Reading." The New York Times Magazine, September 28, 2003 pp. 19-20. U.S. Department of Justice, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft's Prepared Remarks for Milwaukee Law Enforcement. Copyright © 2004 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. Posted: 12.07.03 |
