Metro Pulse/Commentary/Not in the Library!

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by Judy Loest

Somehow, I never imagined the dark forces invading our nation's sacred places, certainly not in Knoxville. And I don't mean churches. No, I mean those quiet repositories of knowledge where people speak softly, where staff has scurried about in rubber-soled shoes long before rubber soles were de rigueur. I mean the most innocuous, apolitical establishments on the planet, namely, public libraries. But, indeed, the unthinkable has happened.

A couple of months ago, I was sitting in Lawson-McGhee's new Rothrock Cafè chatting with a friend who works there. Midway into our conversation I noticed two dark-suited men in conversation near the circulation desk. They seemed out of place and were obviously discussing the library. They also exuded a strange kind of ownership, like maybe the mafia had just bought the building and had sent two kingpins over to scope out renovation. Finally, seeing that my friend was also eyeing them, I said, "What is it with those two guys over there?"

He leaned toward me and said, "They're FBI."

I looked at him, grinning, trying to decide if he might be a little paranoid, might have a tendency to over-dramatize local politics. "You're kidding," I said.

"Look across the street." My grin dissolved when I turned to see two more dark-suited men on the sidewalk beside the Hilton, one talking on a cell phone, the other scanning the street.

Later, still a bit incredulous, I walked home with a heightened awareness of my surroundings. Knoxville no longer seemed a lowly outpost free from the threat of terrorism purely by its inconsequence. It soon seemed sufficiently large in the scheme of national security to warrant FBI surveillance. Suddenly, suspicious characters materialized on almost every corner: a muscled young man in shorts and polo with a wire trailing from his ear to his backpack, a vagrant sitting on the curb reading a newspaper but also watching, a black sedan with tinted windows parked in front of the Pembroke. The skeptic in me soon gained command. Knoxville? Nah.

The next afternoon on NPR, Attorney General John Ashcroft, defending the Patriot Act, was bashing the American Library Association for fueling 'baseless hysteria' about the government's ability to pry into the public's reading habits.

Suddenly, terrorists seemed less threatening than the Bush administration. I read Slate.com's synopsis of the 300-plus-page Patriot Act, paying special attention to Section 215. Although Section 215 does not specifically mention libraries, it permits the FBI to obtain secret warrants "requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." It also prohibits the person receiving the warrant, for instance, librarian, from disclosing that fact to anyone, including other librarians or the person(s) affected by such a warrant; in other words, a gag order.

In September, Ashcroft, caving in to public pressure, agreed to declassify how often Section 215 had been used. To date, he said, it's been used zero times. Right. And if a draft bill to link the wars on drugs and terrorism called the Victory Act becomes law, federal power to seize records and tap phones will become even broader.

Small comfort that two bipartisan bills that would limit Section 215 searches to suspected terrorists or spies are now circulating in the Senate; that the ACLU has filed numerous lawsuits for civil liberties violations following 9/11; and that most libraries, ours included, are purging patrons' computer use records. Thoreau said, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

My point is that threats to intellectual freedom are usually subtle and invisible. Here in Knoxville, the war in Iraq seems a long way away; even the political machinations in Washington seem far removed. Outside of librarians and local ACLU members, I've heard little mention of FBI infiltration of the library. Most folks are more concerned about the price of gasoline rising than about a.) the possibility of their name appearing on a list compiled from a library computer or, b.) the impossibility of knowing if Section 215 has been used against them.

That section, among others, does include a sunset provision that requires Congress to renew the wiretapping and electronic surveillance powers before the end of 2005. Other damaging sections such as Section 213, which allows secret searches of your home and property without prior notice, do not. But the sunset clause is no comfort either because much of the impetus for the Victory Act was to insure the uninterruption of those powers. The question is whether the library will ever recover its historical distinction.

The public library has been called a metaphor for the open society, the symbol of objectivity and fairness, of democracy itself. To me, the library has always been not only a place in which you can lose yourself, where you can fall into a book and, literally, for a time, forget who you are, but also a place where you are lost to others. Thanks to Section 215, that sacred island of anonymity is no more. When I go there now, I'm a little sad and a little wary, for someone may be watching and collecting information about me without my knowledge. Knowledge—it's what the dark forces always shut down first.