Category: usapa

National PATRIOT Act call-in Day

Posted on by jessamyn

It’s a bit of a stunt, but ALA Council is doing a National [USA] PATRIOT Act call-in day at 10 am CST today. All Councilors are going to turn on their cell phones and call their legislators to ask them to

  1. Include language in Section 215 to require a statement of fact linking the person whose records are sought to a terrorism investigation.
  2. Include language to allow a Section 215 recipient to post a meaningful challenge to the FISA court order.
  3. Include language allowing a section 505 recipieint to post a meaningful challenge to a National Security Letter.

Of course, when I’ve been calling my representative, I’ve been going beyond this and expressing grave reservations about Section 215 specifically and other parts of the USA APTRIOT Act generally (specifically concerning wiretaps and electronic communication generally), but this language appears designed to be something that everyone on Council can get behind. So, if you’re free in a few hours, go find your representative and pick up the phone.

PATRIOT Watch: six more months of winter

Posted on by jessamyn

The sunsetting provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act have been extended for another six months to give senators time to research and debate what checks and balances to put into the USA PATRIOT Act before its complete renewal. This is a hard fought compromise, and it appears that President Bush will not veto it, even though he’s not too pleased.

update: I spoke too soon. The six month extension was what the Senate had passed, and was proposing. The two houses finally agreed on a five week extension.

Little Red Book ILL gets patron a visit from Homeland Security

Posted on by jessamyn

A student did an ILL for a specific version of Mao’s Little Red Book and wound up getting a visit from Homeland Security. Obviously, there is more to this story than the short news article, but the article alleges that the Department of Homeland Security monitors Interlibrary Loan requests.

update from the bs detector alert: An ALA Councilor notes that there are two versions of this story circulating with different names attached which definitely sounds fishy and makes it worth further investigation into what exactly is going on. Other councilors have emailed the prof from UCSC mentioned in the second article and he said it was the first he’d heard of it. I’ve emailed the reporter and one of the professors cited in the recent article and I’ll let you know what I find out, if anything. Fellow Councilor Rory Litwin has posted this follow-up to the Council list with more first hand information from one of the profesors involved. I posted a follow-up including some feedback I’d gotten from the reporter of the most recent article. BoingBoing is faster with the summary action than I am.

This is all coming on the heels of some unpleasant revelations about the current administration’s use of the National Security Agency to surveil domestic targets without getting FISA court approval. Who would have thought that this decade would be the one where all llibrarians learned what FISA stood for? How many of you watched CSPAN a little more carefully than usual this weekend [or is my house the only house that does this] to see what happened with the USA PATRIOT Act?

radical militant librarians

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been messing a bit with possible commenting options. My apologies for people who saw non-functional comment links. This was in my inbox a few times whn I got back from a weekend trip to Western MA: At F.B.I., Frustration Over Limits on an Antiterror Law

One internal F.B.I. message, sent in October 2003, criticized the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Justice Department, which reviews and approves terrorist warrants, as regularly blocking requests from the F.B.I. to use a section of the antiterrorism law that gave the bureau broader authority to demand records from institutions like banks, Internet providers and libraries.

“While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR’s failure to let us use the tools given to us,” read the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. “This should be an OIPR priority!!!”

I’m sure it’s lousy to be one of the people who have to use and implement policies that are controversial and/or of questionable legality. However, the pullquote made me smile just the same.