"Terror Reading"

[Steve Schear]

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