Patrons Protest USA Patriot Act
through “Subversive Checkout”
About 60 people participated in a “subversive book checkout” at Longmont (Colo.) Public Library March 15 to draw attention to what the event’s organizers call “the danger to civil liberties posed by the USA Patriot Act.”
Longmont Citizens for Justice and Democracy invited patrons to join a march to the library, where they lined up to check out books from a list drawn up by the residents’ group, including titles on counterintelligence, civil liberties, and U.S. history. “If your library record isn’t quite spicy enough,” the list recommended, “or you long for top billing on John Ashcroft’s blacklist,” participants could try such juxtapositions as A Guidebook to Nuclear Reactors with Explosives and Rock Blasting.
“It gives you the idea of the wrong impression the government can get about you by what you’re buying or reading,” said David Rick, the event’s organizer.
Library Director Tony Brewer said the group had alerted him of their plan and worked to try to minimize the event’s impact on library staff. Brewer told American Libraries he urged staff “to maintain our neutrality, and to do what we would do for any other patron regardless of point of view—answer reference questions, help them find materials, check out books, check in books.”
Posted March 31, 2003.
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