BOSTON -- On the whole, I wouldn't choose to go fishing in a library or a bookstore. The library is a bit dusty, and while the local bookstore may be the final resting place of a forest or two, it's water-challenged.
Nevertheless, the same phrase keeps coming up again and again. As worriers describe the government's ability to search through the records of readers, they label it a "fishing expedition."
They define it as part of Attorney General John Ashcroft's all-terrain venture to catch-and-not-release terrorists.
This fish tale began in the anxious weeks after 9/11 when Congress passed the USA Patriot Act with hardly a dissent. The Patriot Act became the perfect example of the revised adage: Legislate in haste and repent in leisure.
Deep in the troubled waters of the 340-page law is Section 215, a provision that gives the feds the right to inspect or seize the records of any reader, Web surfer, book buyer or borrower. The government can simply get approval from a secret court without showing probable cause.
Moreover, a gag provision means the librarian or bookseller can't tell a customer that the government is reading over his or her shoulder.
This expedition resembles ocean dragging more than fly-fishing.
Among the first to notice was a group of Vermont booksellers including Linda Ramsdell. She runs the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, population 3,500, where the best seller this summer is The True Account, a send-up of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Ms. Ramsdell, who is also the head of the New England Booksellers Association, doesn't usually get involved in politics because "politics involves a lot of meetings and I don't like meetings." But faced with a law she found "really creepy," she contacted Vermont's Bernard Sanders, the only independent congressman.
Mr. Sanders then introduced the Freedom to Read Protection Act -- one of those titles that would appeal to even literacy guru Laura Bush. In fact, the bill to amend the Patriot Act and get the big hook out of the reading stream has garnered support from both the civil liberties left and the anti-big-government right. There are two similar bills now working their way through the Senate.
This is the first provision in the Patriot Act to get much attention. That, says Mr. Sanders, is because this "isn't about Guantanamo Bay or someone from another country. Ordinary people say, `Wait a minute, you mean to say the Department of Justice and the FBI can get a list of the books I take out without any evidence of terrorism? Wow, this is going way too far."'
