i-sako.com

A recent AP story notes that a bookseller in Vermont will purge its sales records at the request of customers as a means of avoiding searches conducted by federal investigators under the auspices of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Although the story itself is interesting, what intrigues me most was this comment from U.S. Attorney Peter Hall, who seemed to be playing down the seriousness of such searches:

“Only in very rare and limited and supervised circumstances would anyone be seeking that sort of business information from a bookseller, a library or a business of any sort,” Hall said. 

I wonder if Mr. Hall has heard of the Total Information Awareness program that the Bush administration has been advocating (and DARPA has been quietly developing under the questionable guidance of John M. Poindexter, remember that name from the Iran-Contra scandal?), the one Congress recently decided was too much of a threat to civil liberties to be permitted. As I understand it, TIA would make liberal use of sweeping legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act to make this kind of activity routine, even automatic—and, uhm, universal. How exactly does that fit under the category of “rare and limited”? 

Sure, you can argue that Congress pulled the plug on TIA, so it isn’t a threat anymore, but the fact remains that the thinking behind it is present in the USA PATRIOT Act as well. It is also engendered in the draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, which was leaked by The Center for Public Integrity earlier this year. (The same logic was also present in the administration’s ideas for the TIPS program, which was also axed by Congress for being an unwarranted invasion of privacy.)

It is clear that the administration has not given up its plans to create a large-scale domestic surveillance program of some sort, so I see no reason to take comfort in Mr. Hall’s assurances that such searches are intended to be “rare and limited”. Sorry, but when it comes to such glaring inconsistencies between the administration’s rhetoric and its actions, I’ll watch the actions carefully and ignore the words, thank you very much.

In the meantime, while librarians and booksellers in the States brace themselves for who knows how many PATRIOT-authorized searches (the Act itself prevents any public notification that records are being sought, serving as a kind of built-in gag order for people in these jobs), I think I will limit my book purchases to Amazon.co.jp, which presumably is not subject to the terms of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Not that I have anything to fear, mind you, but I do so simply in the interest of protecting my privacy, which is an option my fellow Americans no longer have, unfortunately. (Not that you don’t already know what I’m reading—I advertise my reading list pretty openly on this site. But none of that is Uncle Sam’s business, even if I do choose to share it with the public.)