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CounterPunch
November
8, 2002
Snoops at the
Library
by KURT NIMMO
Attention, Mr. FBI Snoop. Here's a short list
of the authors I have checked out of the public library recently:
Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Noam Chomsky, Alexander
Cockburn, and John Pilger. Now you don't have to go and bother
my librarian. She has better things to do than answer your intrusive
questions.
This evening I read an article by Bill
Olds of the Hartford Courant. "I have uncovered information
that persuades me that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has
bugged the computers at the Hartford Public Library," writes
Olds. "And it's probable that other libraries around the
state have also been bugged. It's an effort by the FBI to obtain
leads that it believes may lead them to terrorists."
No doubt the FBI has the capacity to
bug the computers at the Hartford Public Library. On the other
hand, I don't believe FBI seriously thinks it will apprehend
terrorists at the library -- that is unless they consider average
citizens who happen to read what the government may consider
"subversive" literature as terrorists. How many al-Qaeda
terrorists do you think are using the computers at the Hartford
Public Library? How many of them are checking out books? Are
there dirty bomb how-to books are available at the library? Or
cookbooks on how best to mix up a batch of anthrax at home in
the kitchen sink?
It's just not books. It's email, too.
A lot of people use the public library to cruise the internet.
You never know... the guy on the computer next to you at the
library may be an al-Qaeda operative communicating with somebody
in Pakistan. He may be planning the death and destruction of
infidels in an AOL chatroom. Osama bin Laden might be on the
other end of the wire.
Back in October of last year the FBI
checked computer terminals in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs,
Florida. According to the government, 15 of the 19 September
11 hijackers were in Florida at one time or another. Since snooping
at public libraries is secret under the Patriot Act, we will
probably never know if they found anything. Even so, I bet the
FBI knows they're not likely to catch terrorists at the public
library -- or will they scrape up enough evidence to thwart an
attack. It's not al-Qaeda specifically the FBI is interested
in snooping on.
The FBI wants to keep tabs on Americans
who may read the wrong books and harbor the wrong ideas about
their government. Snooping is all about domestic politics.
Do you think I'm paranoid? Read on.
Back in the 1970s -- before Democrats
went completely spineless -- there were committees convened to
investigate numerous abuses committed not only by the FBI, but
also the CIA and the NSA. "On the theory that the executive's
responsibility in the area of 'national security' and 'foreign
intelligence' justified [the use of informants, infiltration,
wire taps, warrantless surreptitious entries, mail opening programs,
even blackmail and violence] without the need of judicial supervision,
the intelligence community believed it was free to direct these
techniques against individuals and organizations whom it believed
threatened the country's security," concluded the Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session,
1976 -- otherwise known as the Church Committee.
The Church Committee discovered much
of the information was "collected and disseminated in order
to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency
or the administration, and to influence social policy and political
action." In other words, they FBI served as a secret police
-- not unlike the Stasi or KGB -- and went after political opponents.
"White House officials have requested and obtained politically
useful information from the FBI, including information on the
activities of political opponents or critics... the FBI engaged
in activities which necessarily affected the processes by which
American citizens make decisions. In doing so, it distorted and
exaggerated facts, made use of the mass media, and attacked the
leadership of groups which it considered threats to the social
order."
"Regardless of the unattractiveness
or noisy militancy of some private citizens or organizations,"
wrote Congressman Don Edwards in 1975,
the Constitution does not permit federal
interference with their activities except through the criminal
justice system, armed with its ancient safeguards. There are
no exceptions. No federal agency, the CIA, the IRS, or the FBI,
can be at the same time policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury.
That is what constitutionally guaranteed due process is all about.
It may sometimes be disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but
it is the essence of freedom ... I suggest that the philosophy
supporting COINTELPRO is the subversive notion that any public
official, the President or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent
power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public
interest, or "national security" warrants it. That
notion is postulate of tyranny.
That was then, this is now.
Consider the 1996 Antiterrorism Act,
which James X. Dempsey and David Cole (authors of "Terrorism
& the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name
of National Security") trace back to the "intolerant
approaches of the 1950s," when association with Communist
or anarchist groups was grounds for exclusion and deportation.
It was this intolerance and distrust of political opposition
that led to the sort of criminal behavior the FBI and other police
and intelligence agencies wantonly engaged in -- COINTELPRO,
Operation Chaos, the Huston Plan, state police Red Squads.
The Church Committee, however, was nothing
more than a glitch. It only slowed down the government's desire
to snoop on and disrupt the legal political activities of American
citizens for a short period of time. Soon, the "postulate
of tyranny" was back with a vengence.
Both the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations
proposed draconian provisions that would eventually end up in
the Patriot Act. Congress rejected the Reagan and Bush proposals
-- including guilt by association, association as grounds for
exclusion or deportation, a ban on supporting lawful activities
of groups labeled terrorist, the use of secret evidence, and
the empowerment of the Secretary of State to designate groups
as terrorist organizations, without judicial or congressional
review. According to Dempsey and Cole, "several members
of the House Judiciary Committee, both Democrat and Republican,
questioned the need for the legislation... The legislation languished
and seemed headed for defeat."
The courts were not going along with
the idea of a police state, either. In 1980, the 4th Circuit
court stated in the landmark case of US v. Truong Dinh Hung that
"the executive should be excused from securing a warrant
only when the surveillance is conducted 'primarily' for foreign
intelligence reasons." The rules on this sort of snooping
were established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA), a law designed to allow intelligence agencies to
gather information on foreign powers without the restrictions
imposed on them by the Constitution. Under FISA, when agents
wanted to obtain authority to conduct electronic surveillance
or secret physical searches, a designated official of the executive
office had to certify that "the purpose" for the surveillance
was to obtain foreign intelligence information. In other words,
the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies were allowed
to surveil "targets" without probable cause -- that
is so long as the surveillance had something to do with a foreign
intelligence investigation.
And then came the double whammy shocks
of Oklahoma City and September 11. Lawmakers wasted no time passing
the Patriot Act -- a virtual wish list of repressive police state
and unconstitutional goodies -- and minus significant debate.
Lawmakers didn't even bother to read the legislation before inking
the act into law at the behest of an imperious and swaggering
unelected president. All of a sudden COINTELPRO is back in fashion
and ready for business. Reagan, Bush, and the ghost of J. Edgar
Hoover prevailed. No Church Committee will be allowed to take
the wind out of the sails of snoops this time around.
All of which brings me around to the
library again. Under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act FBI agents
are visiting libraries across the nation as I write this and
possibly taking a look-see at your reading habits. Even bookstore
records can be scoured. They don't even have to tell you about
it -- and the librarian or bookseller can face prosecution if
they say anything.
As Montag knew -- in Ray Bradbury's novel
Fahrenheit 451 -- books can be dangerous. The Nazis understood
the power of books when they burned 20,000 of them in 1933. So
did the Serbs when they torched over a million books and 100,000
manuscripts -- the largest book burning in history -- at the
Sarajevo National Library in 1992.
Between 1973 and the late 1980s, the
FBI operated another secret counterintelligence operation called
the Library Awareness Program. Back in those days the feds were
checking out what books Soviet bloc citizens were reading in
American science libraries. "Agents would approach clerical
staff at public and university libraries, flash a badge and appeal
to their patriotism in preventing the spread of 'sensitive but
unclassified' information," former librarian Herbert Foerstel
told Laura Flanders of The Nation last summer.
The American Library Association publicly
opposed the Library Awareness Program and it was eventually dropped.
But now, with Bush and Ashcroft at the wheel of state -- and
with the twin cacodemons of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein wagged
in our faces at every turn -- the patron record confidentiality
laws passed over a decade ago by many states are so much water
under the proverbial bridge. Privacy is simply no longer patriotic.
In fact, it may mean you have something to hide.
Although a bipartisan committee sent
a twelve-page letter to John Ashcroft on June 13 demanding details
on the implementation of the USA Patriot Act, the government
has stonewalled all inquiries. No doubt, now that the Republicans
control all three branches of government, Ashcroft's intransigence
will only worsen.
Meanwhile, crouched behind the stacks
at your public library, FBI agents may be snooping on the titles
you check out. Or bugging the computer terminals. They may be
visiting the neighborhood bookstore to find out what books you
bought. Books are dangerous. Books are seditious. Free and inquisitive
minds are unpatriotic. Questioning the government -- as all of
the authors mentioned in the first paragraph of this article
do -- may verge on subversive criminality. "To those who
scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,"
Ashcroft told a Senate committee a few months ago, "my message
is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our
national unity and diminish our resolve."
Remember: Less than fifty years ago people
went to prison for studying the works of Marx and Lenin -- and
the Supreme Court upheld the convictions. During World War I,
Woodrow Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Act allowed the government
to censor the foreign language press and bar it from publishing
antiwar sentiments. In 1918, Eugene Debs, a socialist, received
a 10-year prison sentence for his public opposition to the war.
Think about this the next time you go
to the library.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
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