BOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES NOT SAFE FROM FIRST AMENDMENT
PILLAGING

Joyce Meskis is a First Amendment hero. For the past two years, the
owner of the storied Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver has been
battling a police search warrant seeking information on a suspect's
reading habits.

Meskis threw her resources as well as her venerable organizing skills
in the way of police efforts to violate her customers' right to read
controversial books anonymously. In the court case that followed, more
than a dozen civil liberties and book associations joined her suit.

On Monday, freedom and Meskis won a victory when the Colorado Supreme
Court unanimously ruled that the government must show a very high
level of need before it can start rummaging through the records of a
bookstore.

Books are the way we expand our mind and society. The Constitution
guarantees us access to this universe of ideas free from government
intervention and monitoring. Which is why a law enforcement demand for
book purchase records is so much more insidious than say, a list of
tools bought at a hardware store.

A government's extreme interest in the reading choices of its citizens
has never been a historical positive. Nearly all Confucian books were
destroyed by the Chinese Prime Minister Li Si in 208 B.C. because they
encouraged political and philosophical thought. "Alien" ideas were
purged by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in a massive book burning
at the Wilhelm Humboldt University in 1933. And in the 1980s the FBI
tried to implement the "Library Awareness Program," in which
librarians were told to report to the FBI whenever a patron was
interested in "suspicious" material. But the librarians wouldn't have
it, and the program never got off the ground.

History teaches us the danger of law enforcement trolling in libraries
and bookstores.

For Joyce Meskis, this history came in the form of five drug task
force agents who arrived at her bookstore in the spring of 2000,
search warrant in hand, demanding to know if a man they believed was
running a methamphetamine lab in a Denver trailer park had purchased
two books on drug labs. Agents had found the books in the trailer and
a mailer from Tattered Cover in the outside garbage. While the police
already knew who lived and worked in the trailer, the department said
it wanted to know who purchased the drug lab books as additional
evidence. Meskis, with the help of her lawyer, held the agents off and
then challenged the constitutionality of the warrant.

What happened to Meskis is reminiscent of independent counsel Kenneth
Starr's scorched-earth tactics. He had no reservations over treating a
bookstore as an evidence cache when he subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky's
book purchases from Kramerbooks & Afterwords in Washington, D.C. In
the ensuing court fight, a federal court judge noted the chilling
effect on the reading public this kind of request could engender and
required the government to present a compelling need for the records.

Since then, police have served subpoenas on at least four bookstores
looking for customer reading information. In 2000, Amazon.com, the
online bookseller, was ordered by Ohio authorities to turn over the
list of every person from a large part of the state who had purchased
two pornographic audio CDs in order to try and identify a stalker who
had sent these to his targets.

In each of these cases so far, police have been prevented from getting
the information, in recognition of the special interest a free society
has in protecting its reading public.

Despite this encouraging trend, since Sept. 11 and the passage of the
USA Patriot Act, libraries have again become hunting grounds for
suspicious readers.

Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington D.C. office of
the American Library Association calls it "scary." Librarians across
the country, she says, have been approached by FBI agents demanding
information on their patrons, and under new rules established by the
Patriot Act, they have no recourse but to comply.

Any order issued by under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a
special court procedure requiring far less proof of suspicion than a
normal warrant, must be immediately complied with, according to
Sheketoff. Whereas before a library could challenge the legitimacy of
a subpoena, the Patriot Act specifically precludes any challenges. It
also prohibits the librarian from informing anyone, including the
library board, the local mayor or county commission or the patron who
is the target of the probe, that information has been sought.

Sheketoff said the requests can be extremely broad, asking for
example, for the names of everyone who signed on to a particular
computer terminal that day. Abuses, she believes, are inevitable but
due to the secrecy they may never see the light of day. "All this is
done behind a curtain," Sheketoff says, "and we don't know how thick
this curtain is."

Meskis put out one First Amendment fire but another is smoldering.
Libraries and bookstores it seems are never free from the menace of
the hysteria du jour.