Libraries as Terrorist Sanctuaries (WTF?)
By Richard L. Cravatts Ph.D.
Newton, Massachusetts, which this year was named as the country's safest town, can now add a second designation to its Chamber of Commerce brochures: it can boast of being a town that adamantly protects the privacy rights of would-be terrorists who wish to use its public library.
After a credible terror threat to Brandeis University (in neighboring Waltham, Mass.) was traced to a public computer at the Newton Free Library on January 18th, the FBI and local police, eager to prevent a deadly criminal act and hoping to apprehend the perpetrator, rushed to the Newton Free Library to secure the computer on which the threats had been sent, with the possibility of identifying the nature of the threat and the person behind it.
Several buildings at Brandeis had been cleared, including an adjacent Waltham elementary school. So law enforcement officials were eager to make speedy headway in identifying both the perpetrator and the threat's credibility, and had quickly moved to secure evidence at the Newton library.
What they had not anticipated, however, was that their search would be abruptly sidetracked when Kathy Glick-Weil, the library's director, informed them that no one was searching anything without a warrant from a judge -- this, despite the obvious urgency to act in an instance when a perpetrator was fleeing, time was passing, and a potentially catastrophic incident became more imminent by the minute.
Since the passing of the Patriot Act -- and its Section 215 which governs searching in libraries and bookstores - the American Library Association, of which Glick-Weil is a member, has been nearly apoplectic at the notion that government officials could have authority to monitor the reading and Internet surfing habits of library patrons.
But it is critical to realize that the ALA's sentiments, and Ms. Glick-Weil's personal decision to become a 'human shield' for 10 hours while the FBI waited to secure a warrant and seize the computer, are based on an incomplete and dangerously wrongheaded understanding of both Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the Constitution's Fourth Amendment rights.
The would-be terrorist who threatened Brandeis University from a computer in the Newton library, far from relying on an expectation of privacy and the "right to be left alone" while sending surreptitious emails from a public building, loses those constitutional protections once he conducts his informational transactions in public. As Heather MacDonald, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, recently testified before the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
"like it or not, once you've disclosed information to someone else, the Constitution no longer protects it. This diffuse-it-and-lose-it rule applies to library borrowing and Web surfing as well, however much librarians may claim otherwise. By publicly borrowing library books, patrons forfeit any constitutional protections they may have had in their reading habits."
The librarians point to what they fear will be an inevitable gutting of Fourth Amendment protections to library-goers, Internet surfers, and bookworms everywhere. But they minimize the necessity for changing responses to security threats in the post 9/11 era, and overlook the fact that publicly accessible computers in libraries do not and should not afford a cover of secrecy for terrorists.
These are not merely philosophical debates because the use of libraries by terror suspects has been well documented. Reports were received from Florida directly after September 11 from the Delray Beach Public Library, where reference librarian Kathleen Hensman claimed that Mohald Alshehri, listed as a hijack suspect, had used the library's computers. Similarly, library patrons in the Hollywood, Florida area, where five of the 9/11 suspects had stayed prior to the attacks, identified Mohammed Atta, another of the hijackers, as having used two of the area's libraries.
Despite these facts, the ALA's manual clearly suggests that librarians not only oppose the intent of the anti-terrorism laws but also help obstruct its enforcement as well. Section 52.4. of the ALA's policy manual reads. "Resist the issuance or enforcement of any such process, order, or subpoena until such time as a proper showing of good cause has been made in a court of competent jurisdiction."
Not content merely to make possible homeland security investigations as difficult as possible for the government, librarians nationwide have also taken to regularly destroying computer user lists, posting signs warning patrons of possible FBI surveillance and abuse, and turning off video cameras, as was done in Newton.
This credible bomb threat was very different than a case in which the crime has already occurred: there is a substantial difference between searching for evidence and suspects during the commission of a crime when the intention is to prevent the crime, on the one hand, and the more typical search for evidence after a criminal act has been committed, when law enforcement officials are not driven by the necessity of rapid response. That distinction, which could have been a life or death dimension in this case, clearly did not resonate with Newton officials. Nor, apparently, did the fact that the Supreme Court has repeatedly found that if exceptions are "jealously and carefully drawn," and "the exigencies of the situation made that course imperative," searches during the commission of a crime or when evidence is in 'plain sight' do not violate Constitutional protections.
Our current debate over the Patriot Act, and legislation that came as a result of attacks on America, has focused predominantly on the potential for infringement of personal rights, said Paul Rosenzweig, Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. "But Americans should keep in mind," he says, "that the Constitution weighs heavily on both sides of the debate over national security and civil liberties." That means that even if library directors have taken what they perceive as a "sacred vow" to keep the government from knowing who has checked out one too many collections of Noam Chomsky essays, rights to privacy -- even if they were applicable in the library's public space -- have to be balanced with the reality that the protections we enjoy as law-abiding citizens under the Constitution can be snuffed out by those who exploit these guaranteed freedoms for their own murderous intent.
Here is the $64,000 question: Why wasn't Ms. Glick-Weil promptly arrested for obstruction of justice? Has the FBI become so emasculated they just won't enforce the law against such treasonous behavior?
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=020706D
Newton, Massachusetts, which this year was named as the country's safest town, can now add a second designation to its Chamber of Commerce brochures: it can boast of being a town that adamantly protects the privacy rights of would-be terrorists who wish to use its public library.
After a credible terror threat to Brandeis University (in neighboring Waltham, Mass.) was traced to a public computer at the Newton Free Library on January 18th, the FBI and local police, eager to prevent a deadly criminal act and hoping to apprehend the perpetrator, rushed to the Newton Free Library to secure the computer on which the threats had been sent, with the possibility of identifying the nature of the threat and the person behind it.
Several buildings at Brandeis had been cleared, including an adjacent Waltham elementary school. So law enforcement officials were eager to make speedy headway in identifying both the perpetrator and the threat's credibility, and had quickly moved to secure evidence at the Newton library.
What they had not anticipated, however, was that their search would be abruptly sidetracked when Kathy Glick-Weil, the library's director, informed them that no one was searching anything without a warrant from a judge -- this, despite the obvious urgency to act in an instance when a perpetrator was fleeing, time was passing, and a potentially catastrophic incident became more imminent by the minute.
Since the passing of the Patriot Act -- and its Section 215 which governs searching in libraries and bookstores - the American Library Association, of which Glick-Weil is a member, has been nearly apoplectic at the notion that government officials could have authority to monitor the reading and Internet surfing habits of library patrons.
But it is critical to realize that the ALA's sentiments, and Ms. Glick-Weil's personal decision to become a 'human shield' for 10 hours while the FBI waited to secure a warrant and seize the computer, are based on an incomplete and dangerously wrongheaded understanding of both Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the Constitution's Fourth Amendment rights.
The would-be terrorist who threatened Brandeis University from a computer in the Newton library, far from relying on an expectation of privacy and the "right to be left alone" while sending surreptitious emails from a public building, loses those constitutional protections once he conducts his informational transactions in public. As Heather MacDonald, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, recently testified before the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
"like it or not, once you've disclosed information to someone else, the Constitution no longer protects it. This diffuse-it-and-lose-it rule applies to library borrowing and Web surfing as well, however much librarians may claim otherwise. By publicly borrowing library books, patrons forfeit any constitutional protections they may have had in their reading habits."
The librarians point to what they fear will be an inevitable gutting of Fourth Amendment protections to library-goers, Internet surfers, and bookworms everywhere. But they minimize the necessity for changing responses to security threats in the post 9/11 era, and overlook the fact that publicly accessible computers in libraries do not and should not afford a cover of secrecy for terrorists.
These are not merely philosophical debates because the use of libraries by terror suspects has been well documented. Reports were received from Florida directly after September 11 from the Delray Beach Public Library, where reference librarian Kathleen Hensman claimed that Mohald Alshehri, listed as a hijack suspect, had used the library's computers. Similarly, library patrons in the Hollywood, Florida area, where five of the 9/11 suspects had stayed prior to the attacks, identified Mohammed Atta, another of the hijackers, as having used two of the area's libraries.
Despite these facts, the ALA's manual clearly suggests that librarians not only oppose the intent of the anti-terrorism laws but also help obstruct its enforcement as well. Section 52.4. of the ALA's policy manual reads. "Resist the issuance or enforcement of any such process, order, or subpoena until such time as a proper showing of good cause has been made in a court of competent jurisdiction."
Not content merely to make possible homeland security investigations as difficult as possible for the government, librarians nationwide have also taken to regularly destroying computer user lists, posting signs warning patrons of possible FBI surveillance and abuse, and turning off video cameras, as was done in Newton.
This credible bomb threat was very different than a case in which the crime has already occurred: there is a substantial difference between searching for evidence and suspects during the commission of a crime when the intention is to prevent the crime, on the one hand, and the more typical search for evidence after a criminal act has been committed, when law enforcement officials are not driven by the necessity of rapid response. That distinction, which could have been a life or death dimension in this case, clearly did not resonate with Newton officials. Nor, apparently, did the fact that the Supreme Court has repeatedly found that if exceptions are "jealously and carefully drawn," and "the exigencies of the situation made that course imperative," searches during the commission of a crime or when evidence is in 'plain sight' do not violate Constitutional protections.
Our current debate over the Patriot Act, and legislation that came as a result of attacks on America, has focused predominantly on the potential for infringement of personal rights, said Paul Rosenzweig, Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. "But Americans should keep in mind," he says, "that the Constitution weighs heavily on both sides of the debate over national security and civil liberties." That means that even if library directors have taken what they perceive as a "sacred vow" to keep the government from knowing who has checked out one too many collections of Noam Chomsky essays, rights to privacy -- even if they were applicable in the library's public space -- have to be balanced with the reality that the protections we enjoy as law-abiding citizens under the Constitution can be snuffed out by those who exploit these guaranteed freedoms for their own murderous intent.
Here is the $64,000 question: Why wasn't Ms. Glick-Weil promptly arrested for obstruction of justice? Has the FBI become so emasculated they just won't enforce the law against such treasonous behavior?
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=020706D