The "Library Awareness Program," administered by the Justice Department, is designed to identify potential criminals before they have a chance to commit their deeds. The visits to libraries made by the FBI are used to determine who is reading subversive or dangerous material.
Do you really think the FBI believes that asking librarians to keep records of customer useage is an efficient way to read the customers minds? Do you really think that the FBI foreign counter-intelligence squad has nothing better to do than keep a database of who is reading Che Guevara memoirs? When someone is being obtained as an asset by an intelligence organization, they are very very carefully led down a path of increasingly serious crimes that they are directed to commit (in return for the sex or the paying off of their debts, which are the two standard hooks) by the controller ("foreign spy"). The first event is something quite minor. The aim is, from the very beginning, to put the asset into a compromised status, so that he believes he cannot turn to his own security people and confess - with the chance that he'll agree to become a double-agent, so that the DOD can put disinformation into Soviet hands, and the FBI can build up a dossier of admissable evidence against the foreign controller. Remember, you can't get your own guys out of the Russian Gulag unless you've got a GRU man to trade for. One of the early stages is, being directed to steal a technical book from a library and deliver it to the controller. Now do you see the signifigance of the Library Awareness Program? When I worked in the Route 128 area (suburban Boston), we were briefed to be especially suspicious about folks who would befriend us in local bars after work and, for no identifiable reason, start giving us little tiny favors; over time they would become real "angels" that saved our asses when we were having financial/marriage problems. The day might come when they would start asking for "a little favor in return". Something quite innocuous. Then there would arrive a request that we hesitated to do, but we knew we could get away with it without a problem. Then a few weeks later....