(Friendly Fascism
Alert 🙂:
This chilling editorial by Nat Hentoff for the Village Voice provides some enlightening information about the absurdity of the provisions of the USA Patriot Act which enable law enforcement and government agencies to force libraries and bookstores to hand over their records and furthermore does not allow them to talk about it publicly.
Big John Wants Your Reading List.

This is now the law, and as I wrote last week, the FBI, armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in “international terrorism” or “clandestine activities.”

Once that information is requested by the FBI, a gag order is automatically imposed, prohibiting the bookstore owners or librarians from disclosing to any other person the fact that they have received an order to produce documents.

You can’t call a newspaper or a radio or television station or your representatives in Congress. You can call a lawyer, but since you didn’t have any advance warning that the judge was issuing the order, your attorney can’t have objected to it in court. He or she will be hearing about it for the first time from you…

…As I often do when Americans’ freedom to read is imperiled, I called Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. I’ve covered, as a reporter, many cases of library censorship, and almost invariably, the beleaguered librarians have already been on the phone to Judy Krug. She is the very incarnation of the author of the First Amendment, James Madison.

When some librarians