Shhh!2.0

Edited by author 03-27-2003 02:39 PM
If a bomb blows up my kid's schoolbus and the terrorist's letter claiming responsibility is traced back to a terminal in a library whose records have been destroyed by a protesting librarian, I'll go completely and totally ballistic.

The government doesn't have time to go snooping around and saying "Oh look, LoveGravy was looking at pr0n on the library computer!", so I don't know what people are all upset about. If you aren't doing anything wrong then I don't see any reason why the government would want to find out your book reading, or internet usage, habits. If you ARE doing something wrong, then these records could prove invaluable.

Instead of MY kid on a bus that blows up, maybe it'll be poetic justice and it'll be one of the librarian's kids on the bus instead. "Sorry M'am, we could have caught him, but since there are no records of who had the terminal when the email was sent, there's nothing we can do about it"...


Oh well at least I now know where to go when I want to email death threats to people, or hack into computers, or perform credit card fraud. Their "activism" has helped spread the word that that library's computers are "safe" for nefarious activities. Cool.

"If a bomb blows up my kid's schoolbus [...] I'll go completely and totally ballistic."

Technically, wouldn't it be the bus that went ballistic? :)



The problem is, where does the tracking of what people do stop?

LoveGravy: I am sure none of us wants our children blown up. I am also sure that the Patriot Act does more harm than good. For over two centuries American law enforcement was able to capture criminals without assuming everyone was guilty until proven innocent.
I don't delete our user files so no one knows you're looking at porn. I delete them to make sure no one knows you're viewing subversive works such as those written by persons such as Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, or Herbert J. Biberman.

What you're describing would be a regime under which we'd open an investigations into everyone who undertakes some task -- going to the library, walking down the street -- in order to catch the small minority of people who perform that task who are malefactors.

We've never countenanced this type of regime. Indeed, the cold war was nominally fought to keep this regime from emerging.

The argument that "innocents have nothing to hide" ignores the entire Constitutional notion of checks-and-balances, the idea that human frailty means that no authority's power should be unchecked by due process, public oversight and transparency.

If you honestly believe that the innocent have nothing to hide from the government, then you'd have no problem with a law that banned envelopes in favor of naked postcards that can be read by any mail-carrier between you and the letter's destination.

The outcome of authority without check is dismally predictable throughout human history: despotism, totalitarianism. The nominal purpose of "liberating" Iraq is to free the Iraqis from a regime that offers no due process, that tramples the principles laid out in the Bill of Rights (a document that was penned when this country was far more threatened than it was even on Sept 11, a document that *still* rejected ubiquitous surveillance of the innocent in order to catch the guilty).

Explain to me how the fight against totalitarianism justifies shredding the Bill of Rights, the privacy whence all other freedoms spring?

Edited by author 03-27-2003 03:50 PM
the issue with the "if you've done nothing wrong" argument, to me, is that there is a whole class of behaviors and preferences and ideas that while not legally wrong may be offensive, problematic or just plain old personally objectionable to people, and potentially law enforcement people.

Witness right now the Supreme Court hearing a case on whether gay men have the right to have consensual sex with eachother in their own bedrooms. If I had 100% certainty that personal information about me -- information like passwords and emails that could be *legally obtained* via the PATRIOT Act -- was never going to be used to put me in an awkward position [like when applying for a job, trying to get security clearance, going through an international airport, etc] then I might have a diferent opinion on this surveillance. As it is, there are no such assurances, we live in difficult times and I believe that this act is far worse than life without it.

LoveGravy wrote:

'The government doesn't have time to go snooping around and saying "Oh look, LoveGravy was looking at pr0n on the library computer!"'

Ever read about the files J. Edgar Hoover kept on things like the sexual preferences and kinks of various people he didn't like or wanted to be able to blackmail? Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was John Lennon? What about our Senators and Representatives?

People who want power badly enough can _make_ time to snoop whereever they think they can get an edge.

Another thing is, if these records are relevant to a real criminal investigation (as in your school bus bombing example), I believe they can _already_ be subpoenaed. Now, records of what books a person has read are unlikely to be much use in actually convicting them of a crime, so such subpoenas are pretty rare, as they should be.

The Patriot act isn't about catching criminals, or even about stopping terrorism; it's about eliminating protection of the innocent against government snooping.

LoveGravy wrote:
If you aren't doing anything wrong then I don't see any reason why the government would want to find out your book reading, or internet usage, habits.
----
This is awfully reminiscent of the sort of Soviet propaganda that said "Innocent citizens have nothing to fear!", for the purpose of allaying the concerns of people who thought they were doing nothing wrong ... and those same people got screwed when the rules changed. Not to sound like a paranoid or anything, but it's true. The only difference here is that you're talking about maintaining records on what people did even before the rules changed, regardless of the legal or illegal status of those actions.

I'm a linguist, but my advisor is a joint appointment with Library/Information Science, so I interact with a lot of library types. I laughed, at first, when he said "Librarians are some of the most radical people you'll ever meet!", but he was spot on. Want to spend time with some of the most pro-privacy, pro-Open Source, pro-free-information people you'll ever meet? Hang out with LIS people.