zig: *In fact, your own site suggests that even now the ALA doesn’t have any major problems with the Patriot Act […] The fact, though, appears to be that nothing has actually changed for librarians. *
That may be kind of an overstatement; at the very least, there are some things in the Act that the ALA views with definite concern. I first learned about this while hanging out with some attendees of a librarians’ conference that shared a building with a conference I was attending, a couple of weeks ago (those librarians are much wilder partiers than you might suspect! :)), but it is more, er, soberly confirmed by the ALA report “The PATRIOT Act in the Library”:
And it goes on to spell out exactly which amendments make which differences in constraints on library procedures. What I gather the librarians are most concerned about is that under the new law, certain search warrants are automatically accompanied by a “gag order”: they may not disclose that a warrant has been served or that records have been produced in response to it. Many federal document depository librarians are also apparently pretty pissed about the FBI confiscating thousands of documents, deemed potentially sensitive, that their readers need.
So I would ask……do those who oppose TIPS also oppose these other [reporting] programs and, if they don’t, what aspects of TIPS cause them to single this program out for censure?
For one thing, fraud or child abuse is a pretty clearly defined legal crime, even if the reporter’s evidence or suspicions about a particular occurrence of it may be rather nebulous. What TIPS participants were expected to report, on the other hand, was evidence of “suspicious or unusual […] and potentially terrorist-related, activity”. What’s that supposed to mean?
Asking people to report evidence or suspicion of actual terrorism crimes or conspiracy to commit such crimes is one thing, and I hope that most citizens would have the sense to do that anyway even without a new federal program to encourage it. But recruiting people to watch out for something vaguely called “suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity” or even just something “unusual” is IMHO far too broad and indefinite a mandate for volunteer crime-fighting.