Emphasizing that “not all formal visits are Section 215 visits,” Karen G. Schneider, who oversaw the survey as chair of CLA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, told American Libraries that the committee nonetheless “set up the survey so respondents didn’t provide personal information,” thus shielding any library worker from revealing the location of a Section 215 contact; such a disclosure is a felony under the Patriot Act.
Conducted at the request of the Bee, the survey was mailed to CLA’s 2,000 members and collected data from 344 libraries, of which 260 are public, 47 academic, and the other 27 school or special libraries or library schools. Respondents were also asked whether the FBI had made informal information-seeking contact with their libraries since the September 11 terrorist attacks; 16 answered yes, with six revealing that they had complied with the request. Additionally, 41% of respondents indicated that they had established new patron-confidentiality policies because of Patriot Act provisions. “I’m very pleased at how responsive librarians have been to Patriot Act issues,” Schneider said of the statistics.
A September 25 Associated Press report quoted Rep. C. L. “Butch” Otter (R-Idaho) as speculating that “there may be agents out there who have asked for this information that, quite frankly, the head of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., is unaware of.” But DOJ spokesperson Mark Corallo dismissed as “laughable” the theory that “11 federal judges that sit on the FISA court could not identify that they have not sworn out an order for library records and that the attorney general and the Justice Department had falsified reports.”
Posted September 29, 2003.