“The number of times Section 215 has been used to date is zero,” Ashcroft wrote in a memo to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. Ashcroft said he had decided to declassify the previously secret information “to counter the troubling amount of public distortion and misinformation in connection with Section 215,” the Washington Post reported September 18.
Ashcroft also placed a telephone call to American Library Association President Carla Hayden in which he said people have misunderstood his commitment to civil liberties and promised to declassify the Justice Department’s report on the use of Section 215.
The call to Hayden followed a September 15 speech at the National Restaurant Association conference in Washington, D.C., in which Ashcroft accused ALA and other administration critics of fueling “baseless hysteria” about the government’s use of the Patriot Act to pry into the public’s reading habits. Ashcroft mocked ALA for believing that “the FBI is not fighting terrorism. Instead, agents are checking how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.”
The Association fired off a prompt and strong response to the attack. “We are deeply concerned that the Attorney General should be so openly contemptuous of those who seek to defend our Constitution,” said Hayden. “Rather than ask the nations’ librarians and Americans nationwide to ‘just trust him,’ Ashcroft could allay concerns by releasing aggregate information about the number of libraries visited using the expanded powers created by the USA Patriot Act.”
“If he’s coming after us so specifically, we must be having an impact,” ALA Washington Office Executive Director Emily Sheketoff said in the September 16 New York Times.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, told the Times that the speech was intended not as an attack on librarians but on such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and politicians who had persuaded librarians to mistrust the government. He claimed ALA “has been somewhat duped by those who are ideologically opposed to the Patriot Act,” adding that Ashcroft’s remarks “should be seen as a jab at those who would mislead librarians and the general public into believing the absurd, that the FBI is running around monitoring libraries instead of going after terrorists.”
The speech was the latest in a series of presentations Ashcroft has been giving around the country defending the controversial law, which was passed hurriedly in the days following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The previous week, the attorney general had been greeted outside Boston’s Faneuil Hall by more than 1,200 demonstrators opposing his views, including representatives of the Massachusetts Library Association. Ashcroft was there to deliver a closed-to-the-public speech to some 150 law-enforcement officials, the Boston Globe reported September 16.
Following the release of the memo, Ashcroft stepped up his attacks on his critics. “The fact is, with just 11,000 FBI agents and over a billion visitors to America’s libraries each year, the Department of Justice has neither the staffing, the time, nor the inclination to monitor the reading habits of Americans,” he said in a September 18 speech to police and prosecutors in Memphis, Tennessee, reported in the September 19 Washington Post. “No offense to the American Library Association, but we just don’t care.”
The same day, speaking in Louisville, Kentucky, Ashcroft stressed, “We have never used the authority to review library records,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reported September 19. “No one’s reading habits have been reviewed. Not a single American’s library records have been reviewed under the Patriot Act.”
The newspaper noted that FBI agents have requested patron information from libraries, including the Louisville Free Public Library, following the September 11 attacks, but did not use the Patriot Act. In response to a reporter’s question about agents seeking records, Ashcroft said, “In a variety of settings, law enforcement has asked librarians for information,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reported. “The point is, the Patriot Act has not provided backing for a single request.”
“I am glad the Attorney General finally agreed to declassify this report after almost two years of seeking an open and full accounting of activity by federal agents in libraries,” Hayden said following the phone call from Ashcroft. Last October, ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation joined three other groups in suing the Justice Department to obtain information about how the government has used its expanded surveillance powers granted by the Patriot Act.
However, Hayden expressed ALA’s surprise at learning that agents had never utilized Section 215, citing previous statements from the Justice Department: In March, Corallo said libraries had become a logical target of surveillance, and in May Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh testified before members of Congress that federal agents had visited about 50 libraries; the department later clarified that Dinh was referring to ordinary criminal cases rather than national security cases.
Posted September 22, 2003.