Booked for reading?

Soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush signed into law a sweeping list of additions and updates to earlier intelligence statutes. The legislative package, known as the USA Patriot Act, gave the government an array of new surveillance powers to fight terrorism.

After attacks as heinous and terrifying as those the nation witnessed on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, perhaps it should come as no surprise how willing lawmakers and many U.S. citizens were to narrow the scope of our basic freedoms. After all, in the months following the attacks, no price seemed too high to pay in order to restore the sense of security the nation lost that fateful day.

But maybe we should all be more concerned. Among the more intrusive of elements of the Patriot Act is Section 215, which allows intelligence officials to seize stored records of all book purchases and library borrowings made by a specific customer — using a secret court order that cannot be challenged like a normal subpoena. In essence, the government can trace every book each of us reads, from the innocuous to the suspicious.

Provisions such as this have the potential to trample on the basic civil liberties of all citizens, including students. Consider, for example, a student who reads books about the Koran, nuclear power plant security, or biological weapons as part of a class project — or out of personal interest. Under the current law, government officials could be tracking all of it. People who are not terrorists should in theory have nothing to fear, but the government employees charged with enforcing the Patriot Act are fallible, and it's uncomfortably easy to imagine them making a mistaken inference from a suspicious list of books.

As citizens, we must remain ever vigilant of the threat groups such as al-Qaeda pose to our country. At the same time, we must also be careful not to allow reactionary legislation and fear annihilate the most basic freedoms we have as citizens of this country we protect. — The Daily Princetonian Opinion Board