At 10:48 AM 6/26/2002 -0400, Kathleen Dolan wrote:
In many states, it is illegal to store records showing who borrowed a book from a public library. Maryland, for example, requires destruction of the record after a point and even backups cannot be accessed without a court order.
KAD
Say a public library implements a policy of replying positively to all such inquiries, that is, if asked by a patron the db admin will tell them when their account is free of such inquiries. If a request does come in then the db admin can either: fail to respond (monitoring implied), tell them they are being monitored (violating the law) or lie and say they are not even if they are. So, can the Feds require a librarian to lie to a customer who inquires whether their library usage is being monitored? steve