On Morning Edition this morning, there were back-to-back stories on the Patriot Act (which is up for renewal) and its relation to libraries.
First story focused on a library in Bellingham, WA, where the FBI came calling in June 2004 wanting a list of people who had checked out a book on Bin Laden. Seems someone had written something 'suspicious' in the margins -- that turned out to be a Bin Laden quote when someone at the library did a Google search. So the FBI dropped their court case to get access to the records. (Really, people need to learn to use friggin search engines, especially reporters and law enforcement.) The attorney for the library noted that the Government has always had access to library records, but the question regarding the Patriot Act is whether they must convince a judge in open court that they have cause or whether they can just go fishing.
More below the fold.
The second story focused on the Unabomber case. Law enforcement suspected Kazinsky (sp?) after his manifesto was published and his brother came forward, and looked into libraries near his home to see if he could have had access to several out of print sources used in the manifesto. Absolutely irrelevant to the Patriot Act. They had cause. They didn't even need to look at his personal lending records, though I'm sure a court would have approved that under normal warrant rules; they just needed to see if libraries in the area had the particular books. The law inforcement guy even echoed the library attorney from the previous story, saying that the question regarding the Patriot Act was merely what level of evidence would be required to get the warrant. I don't think it was explicitly stated, but it sounded like Patriot Act powers were not used in this case. But the reporter wouldn't let it go. The reporters last question: "If you couldn't have looked into those libraries, would the Unabomber have been caught?" To his credit, the law enforcement guy sure sounded like he thought it irrelevant, but he helped her make her point anyway, saying something like, "the question is not whether he would have been caught, but how long it would have taken and whether other people would have gotten hurt." The whole problem with this is that it was the reporter's point, not his.
Damn, this false equivalence pisses me off. Let the NPR Ombudsman and morning edition hear from you. To affect your local NPR station, see this diary from from Eddie Haskell on how to be heard loud and clear.