The New Bookworms

A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit once again spotlights the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ill-advised “Library Awareness Program,” which, despite its benign name, is actually designed to enlist the nation’s librarians in the search for suspected Soviet Bloc spies. In the past two years FBI agents have approached clerks in at least 25 libraries nationwide, including UCLA’s, and asked them for information about patrons with Russian-sounding names who show unusual interest in topics on the cutting edge of technology, including robotics and superconductivity.

FBI Director William Sessions has assured congressional committees that librarians are under no obligation to cooperate but that they ought to be told of the threat to the United States from the KGB and other hostile intelligence agencies. The plaintiffs in the Freedom of Information suit--the People for the American Way and the National Security Archive--insist that the program is broader and much more insidious than the FBI has disclosed. They expect their suit to demonstrate that FBI agents use intimidation and deception against library personnel, often singling out low-level clerks instead of head librarians for questioning, then flashing their badges and warning them that it is their duty to cooperate. In some cases, the plaintiffs believe, libraries have been asked to surrender records about which books are checked out--a violation of law in 38 states.

No matter what comes of this lawsuit, it seems to us that the FBI practice is both an intolerable infringement on civil liberties and an absurd use of the agency’s resources. Library patrons ought to be able to go about their business without having to worry about whether librarians or FBI agents are maintaining close surveillance on their reading tastes. The American Library Assn., ordinarily the most circumspect of organizations, has already denounced this program as an outrage and has urged its members to resist FBI entreaties. We can’t figure out what the FBI gains from it, anyway, since the journals and documents in these libraries are unclassified--the same materials that Russian spies, like anyone else, can buy in bookstores or from the Government Printing Office. Don’t FBI agents have anything better to do these days than loiter around libraries?