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Mao's Little Book and a question for an unidentified student...

I had written about this earlier here:

Little Red Book
Some interesting doubts are starting to surface over the authenticity of the story about two agents from the Department of Homeland Security visiting a student who had requested the Peking version of Mao's Little Red Book through an intra-library loan.

Now the American Library Association is taking a close look and they think it's questionable also:

Student Claims Homeland Security Has Book Watch List
A senior at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth says he was visited at his parents’ home by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security who were investigating why he had requested a book by former Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong through interlibrary loan. The student, who has asked university officials to shield his identity, told two UMD history professors that the incident took place in late October or early November after he attempted to obtain a copy of the first English edition of the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, published in Beijing in 1966 and popularly known in China as the “Little Red Book,” for a class on communism.

The story broke in the December 17 New Bedford Standard-Times as the result of an interview with UMD faculty members Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, who mentioned the incident as an example of government monitoring of academic research. Williams told American Libraries, “The student told me that the book was on a watch list, and that the books on this list had changing status. Mao was on the list at the time, hence the visit, which was also related to his time abroad.”

UMD Library Dean Ann Montgomery Smith told AL that the student had requested the book by phone from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, not through the UMD interlibrary services as originally reported.

The UMD chancellor’s office released a statement December 19 that said, “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.” Chancellor Jean F. MacCormack stated, “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.”

Kirk Whitworth, a spokesman for the DHS—the U.S. cabinet department that oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the Secret Service, and Citizenship and Immigration Services, among others—said in the December 21 Standard-Times that the story seemed unlikely. “We’re aware of the claims,” he said. “However, the scenario sounds unlikely because investigations are based on violation of law, not on the books and individual[s who] might check [them] out from the library.”

An earlier report that the incident occurred at the University of California at Santa Cruz has proven false.

C'mon now -- that particular issue is available for free download on the Internet. Why would this government invest all that effort to monitor books... Although in close memory is this little incident that happened about ten miles from where we live:

Library subpoena fight makes it to USA Today
The Deming, WA library story is getting a lot of play today with a first hand account in USA Today by its library director. This is the library in northwest Washington voted to go to court to challenge an FBI subpoena for records of people who had borrowed a biography of Osama bin Laden.

I was discussing the Deming scenario recently with a group of librarians and trustees. I was asked why the library should get the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award for this, when law enforcement followed the right process.

In fact, that is all that libraries ask - I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that libraries want to cooperate with law enforcement but just want to make sure state laws and user privacy is safeguarded by requiring a subpoena (some states) or a court order (other states).

Yet in this case, the subpoena was worth fighting (the FBI dropped the subpoena, by the way, after the library said it would move to quash it). There was no actual suspect, but instead it was a fishing expedition with the thinnest of evidence of a real risk.

Our local library system rocks big time! Posted by DaveH at December 23, 2005 8:48 PM