Pro-Constitution, anti-Patriot

This old mill town, until recently, has been dismissed as being out there, driven politically by a neo-counterculture bent. Here, on the north coast of California where transients are known as “urban travelers,” freshman City Councilman David Meserve is flouting the federal government in his pledge to protect civil rights, giving him the biggest stage of his life.

Much to his surprise, Meserve, a 53-year-old grandfather, recently has emerged as a voice on the leading edge of a nationwide movement that is turning increasingly subversive. A small but growing chorus of local governments and other entities is denouncing, and even defying, a federal law that critics consider a violation of civil rights -- the USA Patriot Act, approved by Congress a month after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the government’s surveillance powers in terrorist investigations.

Under one of the most controversial provisions of the act, FBI agents were given easier access to bookstore and library records, allowing them to secretly track what an individual is reading. In terrorist investigations, government attorneys who seek search warrants no longer must show “probable cause” before an open court; they now can go behind closed doors and ask for an order to seize any record that is relevant to an investigation. The law also prohibits the record keepers -- booksellers, librarians, etc. -- from telling anyone about the seizure. A companion to the act, which would broaden its scope, is under discussion at the Justice Department.

Critics -- including librarians, booksellers, city officials, and a group of congressmen -- say the Patriot Act violates provisions of the Constitution including the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and prohibits the execution of search warrants without probable cause.

In April, Meserve steered Arcata to a provocative stand. The town became the only city in the country to make it illegal for its top officials to cooperate with Patriot Act investigations, in which federal agents also have broader authority to monitor e-mail, conduct wiretaps and use other intelligence tools.

Arcata’s ordinance prohibits its managers, including the police chief, from voluntarily cooperating with federal authorities under the act. (Other cities, such as Eugene, Ore., have approved resolutions, which have less force, with similar directives.) Meserve, who drafted the ordinance with the help of the city manager and city attorney, says he has gotten interest from such far-flung media as Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite TV channel. He has also fielded calls on how to draft such a law from about 30 cities across the nation, though he declines to name them.

“It has obviously caught the imagination of a lot of people because we’re saying, ‘Not here in Arcata,’ the little town that stood up for the Constitution,” Meserve says. (City Manager Dan Hauser declined comment on the ordinance; City Atty. Nancy Diamond did not return telephone calls.)

As a longtime antiwar and environmental activist, Meserve is used to challenging the system with little attention from outside Arcata, population 16,400. Last fall, as a first-time candidate for public office, Meserve, a Green Party member, used the campaign slogan: “The federal government has gone stark, raving mad.” He is “delighted but amazed” at the press coverage of the anti-Patriot Act ordinance.

“That’s the only way you get a movement that isn’t marginalized,” says Meserve, a pony-tailed, backpack-carrying building contractor who rides his mountain bike on errands around town. “That’s the only way you get real change in a society is when it embraces not just the left but the whole spectrum.” Councilman Michael Machi, the lone “no” vote on the anti-Patriot Act ordinance, says the issue has been a distraction at a time when the city is facing major budget cuts. Machi, 53, a bearded, Birkenstock-wearing woodworker, says he is often thanked for being “the voice of reason on the council.”

Parts of the Patriot Act are “very troubling,” he says, but that doesn’t mean the city should pass a law against it. “Next thing I know we’re going to be weighing in on capital punishment and abortion, which is not our job. I ran to be a public servant, and I ended up in a public circus.”

Momentum against the act has been building among local governments, according to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a citizens group in Florence, Mass., that is monitoring, and helping to foster, opposition to the act.

By December 2002, for instance, 17 cities had passed Patriot Act-related resolutions, according to the committee. To date, 112 local governments have approved such resolutions, including city councils in West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Claremont, along with tony Evanston, Ill., and North Pole, Alaska, population 1,570. Hawaii and Alaska also have passed anti-Patriot Act resolutions.

The resolutions, which carry no legal authority, vary in wording. Some directly condemn the federal law while others, such as Claremont’s, simply affirm human rights and civil liberties in the face of provisions of the act that seem to threaten them.

A spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department says opposition to the Patriot Act has been overblown. Relatively few cities have passed resolutions against the law, says Jorge Martinez, pointing out that Congress overwhelmingly approved it.

“You’re talking about Vermont; Cambridge, Mass.; liberal college towns in California,” Martinez says. “The Patriot Act has given the Justice Department a greater ability to protect the American people.”

Contrary to popular belief, federal agents are not using the act to “find out what books regular Americans are reading,” Martinez says. In fact, he says, the law “goes to great lengths to preserve the 1st Amendment rights of libraries, bookstores and other affected entities.” Martinez, who has not read Arcata’s ordinance, declined to say what might happen if the city challenged the Patriot Act in court.

Under Arcata’s law, city officials are banned from complying with requests that are unconstitutional -- for instance, the police department would not help FBI agents track or arrest a suspected terrorist in town if “an individual’s civil rights or civil liberties” are being violated. The town’s booksellers and the county librarians are not covered under the city’s ordinance since they are not city officials. Violation of the ordinance is considered an infraction, which carries a $57 fine, making the ordinance largely symbolic.

Privacy concerns have been heightened since February, when the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group, publicized a draft of a Justice Department memo on a proposed “Patriot Act II” that would give the government even broader surveillance powers. Under the draft, one provision would allow the government to set up a DNA database of suspected terrorists. And groups such as the ACLU and American Libraries Assn. have launched campaigns against parts of the act.

Earlier this month, 35 representatives of the book industry issued a statement supporting a bill introduced in March by Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would exempt libraries and bookstores from the provision that allows federal authorities to obtain records without a search warrant. The coalition includes the American Booksellers Assn., Barnes & Noble Booksellers and Borders Group Inc.

Sanders has 104 co-sponsors for the bill, which he introduced after being approached by Vermont librarians earlier this year. “They said, basically, ‘We want you to introduce legislation because we, as librarians, are being put in a position where we are going to have to spy on our neighbors, which is a violation of everything we believe in.’ ”

Also, Sanders says, “I don’t want young people in this country to think that if they take out a book on Osama bin Laden or nuclear weapons or terrorism, then someone will think they’re a terrorist, and they’ll think twice before they do that research paper.”

Patriot Act investigations largely have been conducted secretly although, in response to a House Judiciary Committee request, the Justice Department earlier this month released a 60-page report on its use of the act. The report did not detail library or bookstore visits, but Justice Department official Viet Dinh, the chief architect of the Patriot Act who is resigning his post at the end of the week, told a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee last week that about 50 libraries have been contacted in terrorist investigations under the act, according to an Associated Press report. But the American Library Assn. disputes the figure, saying in a statement, “the real number of libraries visited and the circumstances of those visits are still not known.”

Librarians nationwide are responding to the act in both subtle and active ways. In Monterey Park, librarians at the Bruggemeyer Memorial Library have posted signs on the public computers, warning patrons that their Internet surfing habits are subject to government scrutiny.

In addition to posting similar warning signs, Santa Cruz public libraries are shredding any paperwork that might be seized, including Internet sign-up logs, says Anne Turner, director of the library system. The response of the community has been largely supportive, Turner says, although she has “received a certain number of e-mails, one out of four maybe, saying, ‘You Commie pinko spy,’ certainly calling into question my patriotism.”

If government authorities showed up at the Berkeley Public Library’s main branch and asked director Jackie Griffin for records under the act, “I would say no,” she says. Griffin, who has weighed the matter carefully, jokes that her staff promises to bring her cookies in jail.

At least two bookstores in Vermont, Bear Pond Books and Galaxy Bookshop, have offered to purge purchase records for customers upon request. At Galaxy in Hardwick, Vt., only one customer has asked to have records erased, owner Linda Ramsdell says.

In Arcata, Meserve says the community overwhelmingly has supported the ordinance, but he has received a few jibes from anonymous callers -- “Why don’t you go live in Iraq?” -- and from the media. On a Fox News show, host John Gibson asked: “Do you mean to tell me if I’m [Sept. 11 hijacker] Mohamed Atta, and I’m looking for a nice, safe place to be, I want to make a beeline for Arcata?”

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) issued a statement earlier this month in reaction to the city resolutions nationwide, saying “we still need these anti-terrorism measures to stop future terrorist plots” and singling out Arcata’s position “on this misguided bandwagon.”

Every couple of years or so, the politics of this city 275 miles north of San Francisco make national news. In 1996, Arcata became the first city in the country to have a Green Party-dominated City Council. (They no longer have a council majority.) These days, protests against war continue weekly in the downtown plaza not far from Victorian homes with gables and turrets. The Food Not Bombs marchers bang pots or plastic buckets before serving free stew to a mix of locals and transients.

“There’s a certain point where libertarians and the right wing and left wing kind of converge, and [Meserve] tapped into that,” says Kevin L. Hoover, editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper, the Arcata Eye. Yet, even here, Meserve is a controversial figure. Most recently, he has been in the local news for refusing to acknowledge the Pledge of Allegiance at council meetings, based, in part, on his opposition to the war in Iraq.

For his part, Meserve invites the attention the city’s ordinance is bringing, and welcomes a challenge in court on its legality. Civil liberties groups have already offered to help foot any legal fees the city might incur, he says. “Come and get us.”