Bookseller Purges Files to Avoid Searches: Some booksellers are troubled by a post-Sept. 11 federal law that gives the government broad powers to seize the records of bookstores and libraries to find out what people have been reading. Bear Pond Books in Montpelier will purge purchase records for customers if they ask, and it has already dumped the names of books bought by its readers' club.
HA.
I wonder how many booksellers will take this route.
For that matter, I wonder how many booksellers actually retain the information in the first place. It's not necessary for inventory control or anything else, really. And if you're the sort of organization that sells names and addresses, there's no pratcical reason to keep the book information attached.
Many libraries already do this sort of thing; once a book has been returned, although the number of times it's circulated remains atteched to the record or the book itself, there's no circulation information on your record, other than maybe the total number of items checked out over time.
U.S. Attorney Peter Hall played down concern that government agents might soon be darkening the door at Vermont bookstores and libraries. "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.
And that would be a flat out lie.
Such record requests from bookstores were becoming more frequent even before the attacks. Kramer's Books in Washington won a court order blocking independent counsel Kenneth Starr from getting records of purchases by Monica Lewinsky during his investigation of the sex scandal involving President Clinton. And the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last year for a Denver book store in its fight against a subpoena of purchase records by a defendant in a drug case
If the requests were becoming more frequent -- if unsuccessful -- before the Patriot Act was passed, just imagine how many more of them there have been since then. And, of course, you can only imagine, since the government has decided in its wisdom that such subpoenas may no longer be fought or publicized.
What I really wonder is how long it will be before Our Lord High Minister of Injustice petitions Congress to make such purges illegal. After all, it's a relatively simple thing to pass a law to require those who collect information to retain it, and to require those who don't to start collecting.
Posted by iain at February 20, 2003 10:02 PM
