Madison Public Library has started to delete more of its patron records so federal agents cannot secretly survey their reading habits, but technical issues prevent university libraries from doing the same.
The USA Patriot Act of 2001 allows the FBI to subpoena any business records, including patron information from libraries and bookstores, if it tells a judge the information will help combat international terrorism or espionage.
The Patriot Act affects public and academic libraries equally, said Ken Frazier, director of the UW-Madison General Library System, but it is not as easy for the university to discard patron information.
The university unfortunately does not have access to the inner workings of Voyageur, the software system that handles UW library records, he said.
\We would like the software to be designed so that the patron history goes away after the transaction is over,"" he said.
In addition to records of books checked out, federal agents could request records of student or faculty computer use, including the e-mails they have sent or received through the WiscMail system.
WiscMail keeps the text of e-mails for several days, said Brian Rust, communications manager for the Department of Information Technology at UW-Madison.
The system records the sender, recipient and date of each e-mail for several months, he said. It also keeps track of the sender's IP address, which can identify the computer it was sent from.
Frazier said he did not know of any case of the FBI approaching an academic library with a surveillance request, and Rust called a subpoena for computer records ""unlikely.""
The Patriot Act, however, would make it illegal for them to disclose whether a request had been made.
Frazier, like librarians around the country, said he is worried about protecting patrons' privacy now that federal agents can conduct secret searches. If agents started a large-scale investigation under the Patriot Act, however, he did not think the gag order would hold.
""I don't believe anything could keep that secret,"" he said.
The powers the Patriot Act grants federal agents are not entirely new. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, originally enacted in 1978 and modified several times, already allowed law enforcement to subpoena business records and conduct surveillance of foreign agents.
Requests under FISA, however, had to prove the investigation's primary purpose was to gather foreign intelligence. The Patriot Act only requires this to be a ""significant purpose.""
-This is the second
installment of a three-part
series on the Patriot Act.
