Question about the Patriot Act in reference to Libraries and Book Stores

I have a question.

I believe there is a section in the Patriot Act that allows for the tracking of individuals and their transactions at Libraries and Book stores.

If this is the case how do these libraries and book stores accomplish these tasks?

Are any of these libraries or book stores currently doing this?

Any insight to this topic would be welcomed.

Thank You.

Jase, i'm not exaclty sure but it must be easy enough to do, just as at airports they have lists of people who should be detained the same concept could be applied anywhere where an individuals details would be known.

If library staff were given a list of people that were allegedly under surveilance and were told to ring in when said people collect books its not that difficult, low tech and virtually no cost.

You would be amazed the way people are quite happy and ready to turn people in.

At my local library, everything as far as cataloging the books and accounts for checking books out has been already changed over to electronic devices. Anything on a computer is easy to do.

So each time someone checks out the book "Where the Red Fern Grows", they've got an easily accessible listing of each day, week, month, person, how many times, for how long, etc....

Anyone that gets online to search things out... making bombs, political conspiracies, etc... leaves a trail that can be traced very easily... just like the systems being used at my local library.

Now... look at the wiretapping program that the Bush Administration is running. Not only is it wrong... people can't rebuke it in court (shown here)... and it's going to continue.



Nothing is secret.

I'm pretty sure that the Patriot Act does allow this. If you want to circumvent it, though, there are ways. Buy all your books with cash, and read books in the library, but don't sign them out.

Tracking the purchase or borrowing of books should be fairly simple. All that would be necessary would be to look at the records under what books you have signed out on your library card, or purchased, if you used a credit card or debit card or store card or something of that nature.

So they way it might work is if you are on a watch list then your transactions would then be logged.

I was wondering if all person's transactions were logged weather you were on a list or not.

I was just wondering if someone on ATS works in one of those arenas and had the inside story.

I think these provisions were in the first Patriot Act and carried over to the Patriot Act II.

Who ever thought the day would come when our government monitors what we read. I guess the next step would be the government monitoring our thoughts.

I guess some might think this is rather insignificant but I see very scary parallels to the rise of Nazi's, the suspension of the German Constitution, the end of private ownership of firearms, and the end of rights in general.

I guess I will be going to the Library and finding out for myself.