Why the Feds Can't Read

John Doe is suing the United States government in Connecticut. Over what? Use of the Patriot Act to search through library records. What library, you ask? Well, federal law apparently prohibits the disclosure of the name, or so the American Civil Liberty Union contends in papers filed in court this week.

The Furies only know what the feds are up to now. The government apparently seeks circulation records as part of a so-called "intelligence operation."

The Patriot Act permits federal officers to seize such records without a warrant or any other showing of need. Elliot Ness gets a wild hair, and before you know it he's looking over the list of mysteries you checked out of the branch libary last year.

I should be more upset about this than I am. It strikes me as more comic than outrageous that the government is going fishing to see who's reading what. What are they doing, attempting to collate readers of the Anarchist's Cookbook with Moslem surnames? 

I am an ACLU member, and proud of it. I do think the confidentiality of library and Internet records is important. But, frankly, in a world of hackers I have long ago concluded that if the government wants it, it has it. Everyone else seems to be able to hack into my data.

But there should be a warrant requirement before eager-beaver federal agents satsify their pipe dreams at the time and expense of the rest of us. Why not ask a judge to sign off on a request? At least make a prima facie case that there is some reasonable basis to believe the information is necessary to some legitimate law enforcement purpose. I'm not prepared to turn the country over to the FBI's vision of the good, true and beautiful. Agents are capable of anything. Just look at Deep Throat, who exposed Watergate not as an act of patriotism, but to get even with a president who didn't treat the FBI well enough r-e-s-p-e-c-t. And then when he needed cash, he sold the story. A venal creep.

My hunch is that the FBI's recent foray into Connecticut reading habits has little to do with terror. A major source of embarassment for federal officials in the state is their inability to get an indictment or in any way "solve" just who bombed the Yale Law School in 2003. Here we are at war on "terror" around the globe and the feds can't even solve a caper at home. I'm betting this latest spasm of activity is related to that failed probe. Hence the secrecy.

They're wasting our time and our money again.

And if I sound personally involved, I might be. I represent a principal suspect in the bombing. In the past few years he has been tormented by agents eager to make a bust.  So here's a piece of advice to the oh-so Special Agents wasting time on this file: give it a rest. And if you're going to the library, why not check out one of the books and actually read it. It's less fun than snooping, but far more rewarding.

Comments

[karl]

Is it possible the feds are just bored with their summer reading list and want to see what people with good taste in books are reading? But let's be serious, the FBI needs to be dismantled and, if necessary, reassembled from scratch. The FBI is outdated, outmoded, and regularly outsmarted. Its effectiveness seems to come from throwing ever more money at problems and demanding ever more constriction on civil liberties rather than addressing the underlying core structural issues it has.

The FBI's counter-terror mission, for example, should go to Homeland Security. It should let Google fix its inability to search computer case files in its regional offices. It should stop being so top-down oriented that it eliminates field agents from exercising creativity. It should broaden the base of people it draws from for its agents (perhaps by changing its draconian policy on those who have ever taken any drug stronger than an aspirin).

The feds, however, would rather sacrifice a few more thousand on the next 9/11, rather read library lists, and stop babies with common names from getting on airplanes, than think outside the box. The reading list warrant is a symptom of a much larger problem.