"Little Red Book" story

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bob Devine <devinebob () gmail com>
Date: December 20, 2005 8:39:44 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: "Little Red Book" story

A follow-up to the story about DHS investigating a student.
Bob Devine

Quoting from http://www.librarian.net

A student did an ILL for a specific version of Mao's Little Red Book
and wound up getting a visit from Homeland Security. Obviously, there
is more to this story than the short news article, but the article
alleges that the Department of Homeland Security monitors Interlibrary
Loan requests.

update from the bs detector alert: An ALA Councilor notes that there
are two versions of this story circulating with different names
attached which definitely sounds fishy and makes it worth further
investigation into what exactly is going on. Other councilors have
emailed the prof from UCSC mentioned in the second article and he said
it was the first he'd heard of it. I've emailed the reporter and one
of the professors cited in the recent article and I'll let you know
what I find out, if anything. Fellow Councilor Rory Litwin has posted
this follow-up to the Council list with more first hand information
from one of the profesors involved. I posted a follow-up including
some feedback I'd gotten from the reporter of the most recent article.
BoingBoing is faster with the summary action than I am.

This is all coming on the heels of some unpleasant revelations about
the current administration's use of the National Security Agency to
surveil domestic targets without getting FISA court approval. Who
would have thought that this decade would be the one where all
llibrarians learned what FISA stood for? How many of you watched CSPAN
a little more carefully than usual this weekend [or is my house the
only house that does this] to see what happened with the USA PATRIOT
Act?


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