BOOKSTORE'S PRIVACY FIGHT REVS UP

Tattered Cover Owner, Booksellers Nationwide, Support Their Readers' 1st
Amendment Rights

It began with Monica Lewinsky. Booksellers hope it will end with Denver's
Tattered Cover and owner Joyce Meskis.

But since Sept. 11, they've grown even more worried about government
attempts to find out who reads what.

Bookstores nationwide, large and small, have chipped in about $30,000 to
help pay Meskis' legal fees as she defends reader privacy in a battle now
before the Colorado Supreme Court. Meskis doesn't know what she has spent
on the fight.

She is resisting Thornton police efforts to see the store's records of what
was inside a large Tattered Cover envelope found in the trash at an illegal
methamphetamine lab in a trailer in Thornton.

"The police certainly have an important and difficult job to do, and we
support them," Meskis said. "But part of their job also is protecting our
constitutional guarantees."

Meskis, a soft-spoken 60-year-old, has owned the Tattered Cover since 1974.
The store is recognized as among the nation's best, and Meskis has been
honored for her previous fights in defense of the First Amendment.

In 1981 she filed a lawsuit that eventually struck down a state law barring
some books with sexual content from display in stores open to children. She
founded Colorado Citizens Against Censorship in 1994 to lead a successful
campaign against a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have
made it easier for communities to label materials obscene.

She believes fiercely that readers are entitled to be exposed to ideas of
all sorts, whether or not anyone else -- or even the readers themselves --
agree with those ideas.

"We don't think that meth labs are a good idea at all," Meskis said. 'We do
want the authorities to do their best to eradicate them.

"On the other side of it, though, is to be protective of the importance of
the freedom to read."

It's the first such case in the nation to reach a court that can set
precedent for other cases, according to Meskis' lawyer, Dan Recht. A ruling
is expected by June.

"No matter what decision they make, it will have national importance,"
Recht said.

"If there is a bad decision for us, I fear it will have a chilling effect
on book buyers," Recht said. "People will be afraid to buy and read
controversial books, out of fear that the government might get access to
what books they read."

In spring 1998, special prosecutor Ken Starr subpoenaed Lewinsky's
bookstore purchase records while investigating her relationship with
President Clinton. Booksellers nationwide were alarmed.

"Frankly, it was a surprise to us," said Chris Finan, president of the
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Meskis was a founder
of the organization.

"We didn't pay enough attention to the fact that our computer inventory
systems were capturing information that could compromise our customers'
privacy," he said.

Police are accustomed to seeking purchase records from other kinds of
businesses -- hardware stores, for instance, when they wanted to know who
bought an ax used in a murder, or the Kansas farm store where Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols got the fertilizer they used in the bomb that
blew up Oklahoma City's federal building.

But booksellers insist they aren't like hardware stores.

They deal in thoughts, opinions, ideas, information -- all protected by the
First Amendment, and they insist that means the police must have
extraordinary reasons to look at customer records.

"There is a higher standard when it's not a hardware store," Meskis said.

J. Andrew Nathan, a lawyer representing the city of Thornton, said one
judge already has ruled that the police do have an extraordinary reason to
see the Tattered Cover records: to identify who among several people in the
trailer ran the meth lab.

"The crime hasn't been solved and it's still under investigation," Nathan
said. "We haven't identified the primary suspect."

In the Lewinsky case, a federal judge issued a preliminary ruling that
Starr couldn't have her bookstore records without proving he had an
extraordinary reason to see them. Then Lewinsky and the government made a
deal, and her book purchases no longer mattered.

But booksellers were on alert. The American Booksellers Foundation for Free
Expression produced a brochure telling bookstores what to do if the police
subpoena their records: Call a lawyer and get the issue before a judge.

Two years later, the police came to the Tattered Cover with a search
warrant. They had found a large Tattered Cover envelope, with an invoice
number on its label, in the trash at a trailer housing an illegal meth lab.

In a bedroom of the trailer, the police also found two books about making
illegal drugs. They don't know if those books were in the Tattered Cover
envelope. They want to find out.

Meskis knows, but she isn't telling.

"It could be books about how to create landscaped gardens," said Recht.

Meskis called a lawyer and got the issue before a judge.

Popular children's author Lemony Snicket spearheaded a fund raiser for
Meskis' fight at a San Francisco bookstore that raised $10,000. TV and
press coverage of the battle spread the word.

And across the country, more police began asking to see booksellers' records.

Recht said he has represented another Colorado bookstore in a similar case,
resolved out of court when the authorities dropped their records request.

"It kind of leapt like a fire from one policeman to another," Finan, of the
booksellers' foundation, said. "They have been trying ever since.

"We've seen a number of fishing expeditions in which the police simply went
in and tried to find out everything they could about what a particular
person was reading."

Among the incidents:

In the summer of 2000, investigators in Kansas City asked Borders Books and
Music for customers' records in a drug case. A judge quashed the subpoena.

Early in 2001, Cleveland police trying to track down who was mailing
sexually explicit audio CDs and other items deemed sexually harassing,
asked Amazon.com for its records of all purchasers in northeastern Ohio.

They wanted a list of people to investigate, "without realizing that, in
the process, they'd be invading the records of thousands and thousands of
people," Finan said. Judges in two states approved search warrants, but the
online bookstore persuaded the government to back off, he said.

In August of 2001, three independent bookstores in Florida, California and
Washington, D.C., were subpoenaed by investigators looking into alleged
campaign finance violations by New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli. The
investigators wanted all the records relating to Torricelli and some of his
associates over a long period. When the bookstores said they would fight in
court, the investigators dropped the request, Finan said.

But then came Sept. 11.

Less than two months later, Congress passed new anti-terrorist legislation.
It gives police more power to see booksellers' records, and it prohibits
the sellers from telling anyone about the search request.

Finan says he doesn't believe the law bans booksellers from calling
lawyers. But he said they can't necessarily get their cause before a judge,
because the legislation puts such issues before special "spy courts," not
open to the public -- and not open even to the owners.

"And of course it's all justified as necessary to protect us from
terrorists," Finan said.

Now, he said, booksellers are working to remind the public of how important
their freedoms are.

"Even in times of great stress like these," he said. "Especially in times
of great stress like these."