Steve Ely

The difference between children and red tape

Barely a night had passed after I wrote a post criticizing James Taranto’s attack on Judith Flint and librarians in general, which hinged on the role of search warrants and the principle of privacy, before I discovered the next morning a post on Boing Boing pointing toward a panel video and white paper from the ALA on a new privacy initiative.  It seems there’s an ALA Privacy Initiative Concept Paper called “Rallying Americans for the Right to Information Privacy,” as well as a survey on privacy practices.  It appears this all arose before the incident at the Kimball Public Library in Vermont, but it seems very related.  Of course, it doesn’t begin to approach resolving the origins of the principle of patron privacy in libraries, something which I’m going to need to do some real research on, but it is worth considering in conjunction.

Later in the day yesterday, I noticed in the visitor log (which I probably watch far too closely, given this site’s minimal traffic) that someone came to the post via a Technorati search for “James Taranto.”  That visitor’s IP was at Dow Jones Telerate, a subsidiary of Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, home of Taranto’s column.  I’m not sure if there’s necessarily any direct connection between Dow Jones Telerate and Taranto, but I kind of hope that it was he himself who found my post and that I managed to make clear how badly wrong his comments were.

If somehow it was, there’s no indication he’s repented.  When I got home from work in the evening, I found my mother had forwarded me his column again (it’s nice she follows him so I don’t have to), after he published a response from Amy Grasmick, Kimball Public Library’s director.  Grasmick therein adds a lot of information not clear from the AP piece and completely refutes Taranto’s portrayal of Flint as obstinately thwarting the police investigation.  Even though she totally shreds his whole argument from the previous column (and he at least is sensible enough not to try to argue with her, since she’s so clearly in the right), he still seems determined to misrepresents matters.  His only sentence here was his introduction to Grasmick’s letter, in which he referenced “Judith Flint, the Vermont librarian who refused to help policemen trying to track down a missing 12-year-old girl.”   He just can’t stop disparaging her for a minute, can he?   You know who else apparently “refused to help policemen”?  The authors of that pesky Fourth Amendment.

Grasmick’s letter is certainly worth reading in its entirety for anyone intereted at all in the issue.  Further showing Grasmick’s healthy perspective on the whole thing is a comment I was delighted to see appear on the post at the end of the day from Jessamyn West, noting that “the library’s head [presumably Grasmick] said in an email to the Vermont Library Association this week [that librarians should] get ready for the deluge of hate mail that comes when you do ANYTHING that’s controversial” and that “had [Flint] turned over the computers, others would have been howling just as loud.”  I probably would have agreed with the howlers in the latter hypothetical case, though.

I particularly enjoyed the bit where Jessamyn, who seems to know the principals personally, responded to Taranto’s inane characterization of Flint as a bureaucrat: “no bureacrat she, it’s a three person library.”  Heh.  It’s actually an epithet that continues to amuse me.  After all, the AP story begins with “Children’s librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on ‘Love That Dog’ when police showed up.”  Apparently, either James Taranto can’t tell the difference between children and red tape, or he hopes we can’t.

Update: The comment from Jessamyn West seems to have since disappeared, which confuses and disappoints me.  Alas.