After serving a warrant at the Kitchigami Regional Library System’s Brainerd (Minn.) Public Library November 2, the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Department seized all nine public-access computers as part of an investigation into a stalking incident that allegedly involved the use of at least one of the computers. “They just stripped us bare,” KRLS Director Marian Ridge told American Libraries, explaining that the court order “excluded nothing, but specifically included the seizure of all e-mail records.” It also required the police to store the machines in the court office for 10 days, so the library could challenge the action.
Authorities returned the five OPAC-dedicated workstations November 6 only after the library won an interim court order requiring their return, Ridge said. She was hopeful the Internet machines would be recovered by mid-November, since the interim order also directed authorities to give the other library computers back with mirrored hard drives as soon as possible.
“We’re just putting the case together,” Sheriff Dick Ross said in the November 8 Brainerd Dispatch, explaining that the suspect “didn’t think he could be tracked that way.”
Posted November 12, 2001.