In the Boston Globe: "When librarians protect terrorists."
Newton, which this year was named as the country's safest town, can now add a second designation to its Chamber of Commerce brochures: It can boast of being a town that is not only safe for its residents but which also protects the privacy rights of would-be terrorists who wish to use its library.After a credible terror threat to Brandeis University was traced to a public computer at the Newton Free Library on Jan. 18, the FBI and local police rushed to secure the computer, with the possibility of identifying the nature of the threat and the person behind it.
What law enforcement had not anticipated, however, was that their pressing search would be abruptly sidetracked when Kathy Glick-Weil, the library's director, informed them that no one was searching anything without a warrant.
The FBI was forced to wait 10 hours to make the search. I know my former profession has lost its collective mind when slavish adherence to naive and ill-informed notions about the proper role of civil liberties can trump the need to act on a pressing threat to public safety.
For the record, note that the ruthless, jackbooted thugs from the FBI backed down in the face of opposition from a single misguided library director.
(Sidenote: the article's author should have refrained from needless denigration of the professional preparation of librarians. It detracts from an otherwise useful op-ed.)
Posted by Alan at February 7, 2006 08:16 AM