FBI Library Access Extended

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s power to demand patron borrowing information from libraries, a provision which Harvard faculty members said violates principles of academic freedom, has been extended for four more years after Congress renewed the Patriot Act yesterday.

Although the renewal was delayed in the Senate for over two months by debate on the Patriot Act’s impact on civil liberties, Harvard officials said that the debate has not substantially changed the provisions of the act.

“I think it was unfortunate that the tilt of the result is to leave the Patriot Act where it was, more or less,” said Director of the Harvard University Library Sidney Verba ’53.

“The politics of it are complicated in that nobody, in an election year, wants to look like they’re not supporting a war on terrorism,” Verba added.

Changes to the provisions that affect libraries were central to the compromise negotiated last month between the White House and key senators who had blocked the passage of the renewal.

But these revisions did not substantively address concerns about the Patriot Act, according to Associate Professor of Government Barry C. Burden.

“The changes were largely cosmetic,” he said.

“It has been like many recent issues: something in which a compromise has been made without much of a change in what was originally intended,” Verba said.

He added that Harvard’s procedure regarding FBI requests for patron borrowing records has remained consistent: librarians have been instructed to forward requests to the Office of General Counsel.

Last month’s compromise specified that the FBI could not demand e-mail and internet use records from libraries, although it can still demand them from the libraries’ internet service providers. Where the Patriot Act originally included a “gag rule” forbidding recipients of FBI requests for library patron information from speaking about them, the compromise provided the option of judicial review of the gag rule.

The Patriot Act renewal legislation made explicit a recipient’s right to consult with an attorney about these FBI requests, and a third part of the compromise removed a provision that would have forced recipients to identify their attorneys to the FBI.

Senior Director of Federal and State Relations Kevin Casey said that the changes to the act were significant, considering that President Bush had opposed making any adjustments to the Patriot Act renewal legislation.

That members of Congress included an expiration of the library patron record section of the Patriot Act—while permanently renewing 14 of the act’s other 16 provisions under consideration—demonstrates that the debate over this provision is not over, Casey said.

“It signifies residual concerns harbored by a significant number of members regarding this provision and guarantees another review,” Casey said.

But Burden still identified the renewal as a major victory for the President.

Eric P. Lesser ’07, who is president of the Harvard College Democrats, wrote in an e-mail that he thinks it is more important for Congress to focus on challenging the legality of the domestic wiretapping program than the Patriot Act.

He wrote that he would have preferred if a few more changes had been made to the renewal. “But overall if I were a member of the House I would have voted to renew it,” he wrote.

—Claire M. Guehenno contributed reporting to this article.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.