Dan Roberts – The Guardian UK – “In the hours before US senators voted to take on the might of the National Security Agency this week, their inboxes were deluged with more than 2,200 supportive emails from a most unlikely group of revolutionaries: America’s librarians. Their contribution to the passage of the USA Freedom Act may not have been as dramatic as the revelations of Edward Snowden, but this mild-mannered wing of the privacy lobby has been stridently campaigning against government surveillance since long before the NSA whistleblower shot to fame. The first politician to discover the danger of underestimating what happens when you have thousands of librarians on your case was attorney general John Ashcroft who, in 2003, accused the American Library Association of “baseless hysteria” and ridiculed their protests against the Patriot Act. US libraries were once protected from blanket requests for records of what their patrons were reading or viewing online, but the legislation rushed through after after 9/11 threatened to wreck this tradition of confidentiality in ways that presaged later discoveries of bulk telephone and internet record collection. In 2005, four librarians from Connecticut also successfully fought a FBI request to use national security letters to seize reading records and hard-drives, forcing the government to drop the case and back off. “When people were asked ‘who do you trust, some librarian, or the attorney general?’, they said ‘I trust my librarian’,” recalls Emily Sheketoff, head of the ALA’s Washington office. “You can throw the attorney general up against us and we beat him because we are the ones spending every morning doing story time with your toddlers and we are the ones – when you have been given a devastating health report – who help you find information on what this means,” she adds. “There is this close, close relationship with people and their library.” Such boosterism might be dismissed as civic nostalgia in the age of Google, but the evolution of libraries from print depositories to digital gateways has put the ALA in the rare position of being one of the few large lobby groups in Washington representing consumers of information rather than producers. “Librarians were the original search engine,” claims ALA government relations head Adam Eisgrau. “As advocates [for consumers in digital copyright disputes] we were not just on the barricades, we helped erect the barricades.” There is no doubt that the risks to personal liberty from having one’s library card or community internet terminal confiscated are small scale compared with the collection of hundreds of millions of phone records or domestic internet surveillance exposed by Snowden.”

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