Steve Schear <schear@lvcm.com> wrote :

After reading this ALA document http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/usapatriotlibrary.html , I believe I have concocted a legal administrative measure to thwart the anonymous fishing expeditions (esp.those authorized under the USA Patriot Act). In a nutshell, libraries would create a database to track and manage LE requests (this might be manual or online). They would also make available a special service, perhaps charged to their library account, for their patrons to check whether their names were in this database and guarantee a response within 48 hours. If they were in the DB the library would fail to respond, thus providing a sort of ZK proof of investigation.

Q: Are such "deadman" data bases systems unlawful? Can LE force the library to provide false information to a patron?

Looks like they can do any damn thing they please up to and including killing you and be praised for it. Somewhere underneath the pseudopatriotic chanting and totalitarian terrorism there lies what's left of America. May it rest in peace.

steve

I think maybe the better approach would be to ensure that the information they might be looking for is never created. Various anonymity systems for book checkout and collateral might be devised. Probably the best approach would be to digitize books and let them circulate on CD via sneakernet. Then you get into the handy dandy little ID code that each CD writer contains and writes to each CD. Anyone know how to defeat that? I think a random # option would be nice. Books without images should compress very nicely as text files. I think everybody should have a copy of every book. There is safety in uniformity. Mike