Thwarting LE library fishing expeditions

Michael Motyka mmotyka at lsil.com
Fri Aug 30 13:17:13 PDT 2002


Steve Schear <schear at 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





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