That the Patriot Act makes it easier for the FBI to gather information
about you from your library usage is just one of the "library problems"
with the act. What I think is a worse tragedy is the loss (read this as
"removal from the library") of information that took us years to get
there.
Public-right-to-know laws, the freedom of information act, and sunshine
laws basically have been thrown out the window for the sake of "national
security."
You used to be able to go to the library and find your community or
county emergency plans. Being knowledgeable of what would happen in an
emergency used to be construed as good citizenship. Indeed, emergency
personnel could help you better if everyone understood the plans and if
confusion were reduced. Now it has been determined that you are better
off not knowing, and some increased level of confusion is preferable in
order to avoid the risk that some individual or group of individuals
might use knowledge of emergency plans to thwart the emergency plans.
Examples... Don't let people know where to go for emergency help because
if people know where to go then someone might attack the emergency help
center. Don't let people know the evacuation routes because someone
might bomb or blockade the evacuation routes. Don't let people know
what they might do to protect themselves from accidental releases of
chemicals from the local chemical plant because that would require some
knowledge of what is stored at the plant and that would allow a
terrorist to know some potential targets.
As a result, local "emergency planning" officials, who used to work hard
to educate the public about their plans, have been renamed "homeland
security" officials, and now they work hard to keep their plans secret.
They have gone to all the local libraries and confiscated all the
documents that have any of this type of information. These are
documents that were long considered not just public-right-to-know, but
indeed public-need-to-know. It took years to get these documents there;
it took one day to get them out.
It doesn't strike me a whole lot different than "book burning." It also
strikes me as contrary to the idea that a well informed or well educated
public is a good thing, and contrary to the idea of "the truth makes
free."
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu