and you know it.
What books would you take out to drive them crazy? You may assume that your library contains any real book you care to name.
I think I’d check out both suspicious books (bomb making, nuclear weapons etc) and then totally innocent books. Make them believe there is something sinister going on and they start having to keep track of those books as well.
Making patterns could be fun as well that you always check out a particular set of books on a specific date or sequences of books.
An interesting question. I’d think the difficulty in actually “driving them crazy” would be to have just enough “subversive” books to flag you as a possible threat, but not be entirely obvious. You end up in the Waterhouse dilemma from Cryptonomicon (after all, you have to consider that lack of a pattern is still a pattern of sorts).
So, pad the list with a couple arbitrary romance novels, best-sellers, self-help, etc. Then, buried in the list, Catcher in the Rye, a couple biographies on Joan of Arc (and some other martyr/fanatics), some hard science on organic chem and infectious disease, some mechanical engineering, American Psycho, perhaps some Jack Kerouac (and other beats or later counter-culture figures), Dante, Augustine, etc. and the muslim equivalents (if there are such authors), and some travel books, both foreign and domestic.
I’ve been in a glut of paranormal vampire/psi-mind power/ romance novels lately.
Make of that what you will.
If they were monitoring what I read, they’d already have come for me. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
Wouldn’t work for me. My library erases the records of what books I’ve checked out as soon as I return them. I found that out when I’d forgotten the name of an author I wanted to look for other books by.
Iunno. The last books I checked out were In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. So I’m a dangerous psychopath who’s on the fast-track to the death chamber.
Robin
Obviously, Catcher in the Rye. Over and over again. From many different libraries all over the country.
A steady diet of right-wing political literature (anything by Rush Limbaugh, authorized biographies of Republican politicians, etc.), interspersed with the occasional Anarchist’s Cookbook and the like.
I presume that this thread is a hypothetical, not a statement of what DHS is actually succeeding in, since most libraries are fighting back rather strongly against such policies.
I almost actually did this:
Lolita
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Some time ago I came upon a list of the books Lee Harvey Oswald took out in the time before the Kennedy Assassination. I recal the following:
Two Horatio Hornblower Novels
Two James Bond novels by Ian Fleming
Profiles in Courage, ostensibly by JFK
A science fiction anthology edited by Groff Conklin
I’ve got all those books in my bookshelf. You could argue that Oswald was studying his subject (Profiles in Courage. Plus, Kennedy gave Fleming a boost when he acknowledged reading James Bond novels), but on the other hand, it just might be his choice in literature.
So I could screw with their minds by taking out the same books Oswald took out. Except I already did. Aaahhhhhhhh!!!
This is the same sort of game my cousins and I play with the NSA. Whenever we talk to each other long-distance, and especially when one of us is out of the country, we always lace the conversation with innocent references to “bombs, presidents and Bin Laden.”
“Did you see that movie? It was such a bomb. I hope the president of the studio got fired. The negative should be tossed in the trash bin. It was laden with garbage.” Let the NSA computers have fun with those “key” words. 
I’ve got about 30 of those on my bookshelf! I wonder which it was.
My thought was that I’d do something like Chronos and take out books for wildly different fringes. But thinking about it, you could do something equivalent to sequential thread titles with books.
Any and all books on forensic science. I like reading those anyway, and they create ambiguity: am I reading them because I want to learn how to catch criminals, or learn how to be one and get away with it?
Similarly confusing: books on guns. What kind of gun owner am I: fine upstanding law-abiding patriot type, or weird scary type? Do I even have a gun, or do I just like to read about them?
And, of course, Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, books of anarchist philosophy, Christian apologetics (the crankier the better) and the Koran, all at once.
Augustine? Now, you don’t want to get too obscure, here. I’ve known some FBI agents, and they weren’t the most culturally literate people I’ve known. And I doubt highly they’ve got their top guys working this project. Likely, it’s a bunch of low-level saps scanning the lists for easy-to-decipher titles as “How to Blow Up a Building For Dummies.”
Well, I honestly do not believe that they have individuals combing through people’s records – at least, not to begin with. It’s all about data mining, as in the Total Information Awareness program. Or Amazon.com’s recommendations (e.g., People who bought Ricin – Not Just for Japanese Subways also bought Lee Harvey and JFK: More Than Your Average Affair and Dante, De Sade and Dark Ambitions).
Which is why I doubt that a random selection of books would do it; there needs to be at least some pattern.
I would check out Anarchist Cookbook, and other books along that catagory, and a book on how to potty train little kids. Each week check out a book on how to build bombs etc, and also one book on how to potty train. Let them figure it out.
Don’t know why, but I am still laughing about that. I crack myself up.
-Otanx
All the works of Robert Anton Wilson, the Marquis de Sade, P.J. Travers and Daniel Pinkwater, plus anything selected by Oprah’s Book Club. Let them try to figure that out.
Got this through ILL back even before McVeigh…
THE TURNER DIARIES
Beat that!
I think I’d see if I could get them to jack up the threat level in some really unlikely place:
Nerve Gas for Dummies; the IUPAC Handbook of Methylphosphonates; the U.S. Army Field Manual No. 42-1138: Improvised Chemical Weapons; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Staging Mass Casualty Terrorist Attacks; My Big Book of Sarin; the ASHRAE Guide to HVAC Systems for Large Buildings; the ADC Street Map Book: Greater Fargo, North Dakota; Frommer’s Guide to Eastern North Dakota; Municipal Storm Drain Systems of North America, Vol. XLII: Fargo, ND/Moorhead, MN; The Fargodome: A History; the North Dakota State University Campus Guide; Let’s Go: Fargo!; the Fargo Civic Center Event Guide: 2006; Brainerd Bed & Breakfasts; a VHS of Fargo by the Coen brothers; and a biography of William “Wild Bill” Langer.
Note: All book titles pretty much made up out of thin air. Except for the movie Fargo by the Coen brothers.
If you see a story on CNN that they’ve raised the threat level in Fargo to Burnt Umber, then you know you’ve scored.