Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2015 19:13:47 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] NSA surveillance: how librarians have been on the front line to protect privacy
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
In the hours before US senators voted to take on the might of the National
Security Agency this week, their inboxes were deluged with more than 2,200
supportive emails from a most unlikely group of revolutionaries: America\342\200\231s
librarians.

Their contribution to the passage of the USA Freedom Act may not have been
as dramatic as the revelations of Edward Snowden, but this mild-mannered
wing of the privacy lobby has been stridently campaigning against
government surveillance since long before the NSA whistleblower shot to
fame.

The first politician to discover the danger of underestimating what
happens when you have thousands of librarians on your case was attorney
general John Ashcroft who, in 2003, accused the American Library
Association of \342\200\234baseless hysteria\342\200\235 and ridiculed their protests against
the Patriot Act.

US libraries were once protected from blanket requests for records of what
their patrons were reading or viewing online, but the legislation rushed
through after after 9/11 threatened to wreck this tradition of
confidentiality in ways that presaged later discoveries of bulk telephone
and internet record collection.

In 2005, four librarians from Connecticut also successfully fought a FBI
request to use national security letters to seize reading records and
hard-drives, forcing the government to drop the case and back off.

\342\200\234When people were asked \342\200\230who do you trust, some librarian, or the attorney
general?\342\200\231, they said \342\200\230I trust my librarian\342\200\231,\342\200\235 recalls Emily Sheketoff,
head of the ALA\342\200\231s Washington office.
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/nsa-surveillance-librarians-privacy>

And you wonder why, when I was at a science fiction con a year or two ago,
in a panel, one of the audience got up to ask a question, and began with
"I'm a librarian"... which got her a round of applause. *We* know who is
valuable....

         mark