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Wednesday, December 21, 2005 |
Update: "DHS visits student over Little Red Book" report.
There's been much debate online in recent days about the veracity of this story in a Massachussetts newspaper.
According to the article by Standard-Times reporter Aaron Nicodemus, a student at the University of Massachussetts was visited at his parent's home by Homeland Security agents after he requested a collection of Mao Tse-Tung quotes known as "The Little Red Book" via interlibrary loan.
Many questioned whether all of the facts in the story added up. Questions remain -- is the assertion that DHS visited the student confirmed as fact? If so, how did DHS obtain the book loan request data? -- but here are some reactions from librarians and university officials close to the story. If all of the facts reported are confirmed, as the reporter maintains, it is indeed a troubling story.
Here is a statement from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, lifted from a listserv for librarians:
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth officials are investigating reports that a student at the university was visited by officials from Homeland Security after the student requested a copy of Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book". UMass administrators have interviewed the student who has requested that his identity be shielded, and the University is complying with that request.
At this point, it is difficult to ascertain how Homeland Security obtained the information about the student's borrowing of the book. The UMass Dartmouth Library has not been visited by agents of any type seeking information about the borrowing patterns or habits of any of its patrons and did not handle the request for the book in question. The student has indicated that another university library processed the request.
The UMass Dartmouth library has established policies for handling requests under the Patriot Act and has taken every lawful measure possible to protect the confidentiality of patron records.
The Library subscribes to the American Library Association Library Bill of Rights and was a signatory to the MCCLPHEI (Massachusetts Conference of Chief Librarians of Public Higher Educational Institutions) resolution on the USA Patriots Act submitted to the Massachusetts Civil Liberty Union in 2003.
UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Jean F. MacCormack said, "It is important that our students and our faculty be unfettered in their pursuit of knowledge about other cultures and political systems if their education and research is to be meaningful. We must do everything possible to protect the principles of academic inquiry.''
Ann Montgomery Smith
Dean of Library Services
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Library And here is an item posted on the ILL-L listserv:
We do not believe that the story is a hoax. One of the professors named in the story, Brian Williams, is the son of two of our Stetson University professors. We emailed him about the story being on the ILL listserv and he replied:
"I am delighted to hear that librarians are aware of this outrage. I was wondering if you could possibly give me a link to the site that displayed the story. All is well here in Boston, the story has caused a surge of interest in academic freedoms and I have been inundated with emails from people urging me to teach my class."
Of course, the big question still remains: WHAT was being monitored -- the local system or OCLC or what?
Susan Ryan, Associate Director
duPont-Ball Library
Stetson University. DeLand, FL
(Thanks, Sean; and thanks, Kate Sherrill of Ivy Tech Community College in Evansville, Indiana)
[Boing Boing]
11:41:12 PM 
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News from Korea: Real-name system to prevent Internet slander, by Seo Ji-eun, JoongAng Daily.
A restrictive real-name system for the Internet will take effect as early as the first half of next year. . . . . . . Following the measure, large portal operators will require users to reveal their identities before registering initially. Once their identities are confirmed, users can make Web postings under bogus names. The government will also allow portals to delete content at the request of a third party when messages have potential for libel or defamation. Even when the people who actually made the postings disagree, portal operators will be able to evade legal charges under the new law. 
11:18:37 AM
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Nullification, 21st-century style.
In order to understand the nature of the strange constitutional crisis President Bush has dragged the country into through his bizarre extralegal domestic surveillance program, you have to dig into the vaults of your brain's American history storehouse and drag out the word "nullification." The doctrine of nullification, a legal concept that enjoyed a brief moment in the sun in the antebellum South, held that individual states had the power to disregard, or "nullify," federal laws that they didn't like. It led to various crises during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, and the conflicts between Washington and the Southern states did not get fully resolved until the Civil War settled them once and for all, establishing the force of the federal writ through the force of the federal arms.
Today, the Bush administration has been steered into dangerous waters by veterans of the Nixon/Ford era, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who have pursued a decades-long quest to reassert the glories of the imperial presidency they cherished as young men and then saw shamed and dismantled in the aftermath of Watergate. Most Americans at the time concluded from that scandal of executive privilege that absolute power corrupts absolutely; Cheney and Rumsfeld believed instead that Watergate had crippled and emasculated the presidency. 9/11 gave them an opportunity to bring back the good old days of enemies' lists, intelligence-doctoring and (now we know) domestic surveillance -- and even to extend the tradition of the imperial presidency into hitherto unexplored regions of White House-sanctioned torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and war without end.
And so we find ourselves entering a period of conflict with peculiar overtones of that "nullification" period. Only now it's not the states attempting to usurp the federal authority; in the Bush version of nullification, it's the Executive Branch that has begun to claim for itself the arbitrary and absolute right to disregard the explicit will of the legislature -- not through the exercise of constitutional veto but through secrecy, legal chicanery and sheer chutzpah.
In claiming that the president's basic role as wartime leader and commander-in-chief gives him the broad authority to disregard any law that he (and he alone) decides is impeding his goal of protecting the nation, the Bush administration's lawyers are granting the occupant of the Oval Office a unique authority to step outside of the constitutional process by which laws are passed by Congress and signed (or vetoed) by presidents and reviewed by Supreme Court justices. Forget checks and balances, we're being told; in the age of terrorism, they no longer obtain.
Let's understand the chronology here: . . . .
. . .
POSTSCRIPT: Brad DeLong asks why Bush and Cheney wouldn't worry that their Doctrine of Presidential Infallibility, if allowed to stand, wouldn't hand the same absolute power to some "future left-wing president." "There are two possible answers: (a) They are really stupid. (b) They are really evil--they do not intend for there to be a left-wing president ever again. I vote for (a) myself. I wish I could suppress the still small voices in my head that are whispering (b). I hate the way this administration has turned me into a nutbar conspiracy theorist."
[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
I snipped out stuff worth reading, but too long to repost here. You should read it on Scott's blog.
Alternate answer to Brad DeLong's question: It occurs to them, but they don't care, because that's a problem in the future if at all, and this administration discounts future prospects at a dramatic rate when addressing present situations. THis Bush is not about deferred gratification. Quite the contrary.
7:37:56 AM
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The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide. Hunting for media streamers, GPS navigators or a home robot for the special techie in your life? Look no further. By Christopher Null and Robert Strohmeyer. PLUS: Great Gamers' Gift Guide of 2005 [Wired News]
7:33:23 AM
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NeXT Fans Give Up the Ghost. An influential user group formed around Steve Jobs' doomed NeXT Cube dissolves after sticking together for 15 years -- considerably longer than the computer itself. By Pete Mortensen. [Wired News]
7:32:29 AM
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Bloggers, media ethicists respond to NYT's camwhore story.
Snip from a sexerati post critiquing the epic-length New York Times feature on teen webcam site operators, Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World:
 Why is this news now? Salon tread here first (âCandy from strangersâ), long ago, back in 2001. Whatâs new now is that a former teen webcam site operator and owner, the subject of the lengthy and multiply sidebar-ed feature, after being approached by the Times journalist â who was, at the time, posing as a customer and fan â was urged by the journalist to end his involvement with his and related sites, and to pursue criminal charges against those he still knew in the online circles in which he profited, with legal assistance supported by the journalist.
All of which begs the question â how can one even report thoroughly on this issue without becoming a part of it, and how does that fundamentally compromise that reporting â which Slateâs Jack Shafer ("The New York Times Legal Aid Society: The newspaper helps a very young pornographer find a lawyer") candidly asks. Because we know the Times is having hard enough time lately with such issues. Adding teenagers and porn to the pot hardly clarifies things.
Link to full post.
[Boing Boing]
7:28:06 AM
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