Librarians.

This is coolbert:

I see Illinois has two Senators that are willing to touch controversial subjects regarding the current war we are fighting and the methods involved.

The newly elected Senator from Illinois Barack Obama has spoken before a convention of librarians and called for the repeal of that section of the Patriot Act that allows the government to look at library records and examine the "reading lists" of patrons.

"Obama's Stand Against Patriot Act Cheered"

"CHICAGO - To the cheers of thousands of librarians, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday called for the Senate to rewrite the USA Patriot Act to prevent investigators from scanning library records and bookstore sales slips."

As I have blogged about before, this section of the Patriot Act seems to have cut right to the bone with some folks.

"Libraries should be 'sanctuaries of learning where we are free to read and consider what we please without the fear that 'Big Brother' may be peering over our shoulder,' Obama said in the keynote address at the American Library Association's annual conference."

Is this correct?? That we are seeing here an unwarranted intrusion into the rights of Americans. Something that goes right to the heart of what Americanism is all about??

In the words of one attendee at the convention:

"librarians 'are not people who want to help terrorists,' but want to see reading lists protected from automatic surveillance."

Is this what this all about. Reading lists of library patrons??

NO!! Emphatically NO!!

What is it about then??

It seems the 9/11 terrorists were using PUBLIC LIBRARY COMPUTERS TO SECRETLY COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER. AND WERE PERHAPS USING A VERY SECURE FORM OF SECRET COMMUNICATION TO DO SO. CALLED STEGANOGRAPHY.

Again, so even the most casual of observers can understand this easily, the terrorists were using our own public library computers to communicate.

The "controversial" portion of the Patriot Act had NOTHING to do with reading lists. That was not the intention.

And when the FBI, when performing a murder investigation into 3000 Americans after 9/11, wanted to examine the computers that the terrorists had used to secretly communicate with one another, the librarians refused access to the investigators, to preserve "the privacy of the terrorists". The terrorists by this time were already dead. So you were not preserving anyone's privacy at that point.

This is absurd in the extreme.

And, it is my understanding, that since the Patriot Act went into effect, some if not most librarians have installed software on their public computers that allow a persons trail of communications on the world wide web to be stricken almost immediately anyhow. So what is the beef!!??

Steganography is a very secure and subtle form of communication. Secret messages are embedded into pictures. The pictures are then sent on the internet as ordinary e-mail. The softwares [freewares] to accomplish this are very sophisticated indeed. And very hard for the interceptor to determine if a secret message is even embedded. Additional security is guaranteed as the messages are not only embedded in the picture, but are encrypted as well, using a very secure algorithm such as Blowfish. Hard stuff to deal with.

For those of you who are interested, here is a site for steganography freeware. Try it. Pretty good stuff. Free too. Like so much of the secure encryption on the world wide web.

Read the whole article about Obama and the librarians by clicking here.

coolbert.