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Patriot Act puts library workers on edge Keach Hagey / Greenwich Time | April 29 2006 Weak. Thin. Disappointing. Scary. As the president of the Connecticut Library Association, Alice Knapp had lots of words to describe the recent revisions to the Patriot Act, which was renewed with some changes earlier this year. She shared them yesterday with the League of Women Voters of Greenwich, which had invited her to speak at a luncheon at the Cos Cob Library. At the heart of her talk were criticisms of the ways the law gives power to the FBI to demand that librarians hand over information about patrons. "It goes back to the fundamental essence of what a library is," she said. "What impact will that have on us and our desire to go in and use a library if we have this fear that it can be used against us?" The Patriot Act, passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, allows expanded surveillance of terror suspects, increased use of material witness warrants to hold suspects incommunicado, and secret proceedings in immigration cases. It also removed a requirement that any records sought in a terrorism investigation be those of someone under suspicion. Now, anyone's records can be obtained if the FBI considers them relevant to a terrorism or spying investigation. At the national level, the League of Women Voters has sharply criticized the law's curtailment of civil liberties, and has charged its local chapters with educating the public about it, according to Phyllis Matthews, vice president of programs for the Greenwich league. "This affects anyone who uses libraries," she said. To illustrate the evolution of the law and its recent changes, Knapp, who works at Ferguson Library in Stamford, walked the dozen attendees through the case of Trumbull resident George Christian, a librarian who received a national security letter from the FBI under the Patriot Act requiring him to hand over records about library patrons. National security letters require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and others to produce highly personal records about customers or subscribers. People who receive the letters are prohibited by law from disclosing it to anyone. However, under the revised act, recipients can appeal the gag order. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of Christian and a group of several other Connecticut librarians last year, arguing the gag order prevented them from participating in a debate over how the Patriot Act should be rewritten. "It's hard to talk about whether there is a problem or not when the people who receive (the national security letters) cannot talk about it," Knapp said. Two weeks ago, federal prosecutors dropped the case, saying their appeal to U.S. District Judge Janet Hall's ruling last year that the gag order should be lifted no longer made sense. Knapp believes the media furor surrounding the federal government's keeping Christian from identifying himself and speaking out -- he was outed in news reports based on accidentally unedited documents -- helped highlight people's concerns about the act and push through some of the reforms that reined it in slightly. "I think his silence actually became a shout," she said. Some of these positive changes, in her view, included explicit language telling people who have received a national security letter that they have a right to talk to a lawyer, standards that keep the FBI from using national security letters to go on information "fishing expeditions" and limits that would in most cases keep librarians from being subject to receiving national security letters. But the new act also specifies five-year jail sentences for people who receive a national security letter and don't cooperate, and what she described as loose language that might let librarians get pulled back into the fray, depending upon how it is interpreted. According to the new act, libraries functioning in their "traditional capacity" will no longer get national security letters. "I think the language is ambiguous, and we may be fighting this battle in the future," she said. ---------------------------------------------------
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