From the President: PATRIOT Games and Patriot Acts

Abstract

In 1976, library scholar Robert Hauptman visited a bunch of libraries and asked reference librarians for information on how to make a bomb. Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, he was shocked—shocked! — that librarians would give him relatively unquestioning (if sometimes ineffective) assistance. In the resulting article, he argued that librarians have a responsibility to the safety of the community that outweighs our traditional commitment to protect the individual’s right to seek information — in short, that librarians should narc on patrons whose information needs seem dangerous.