Pass this on to your friends

I rarely make "announcements", so I hope that you will take this seriously.For those of you who have friends (particularly male friends) of Middle Eastern descent who live in America, you may want to warn them about this: FBI trawls libraries for terrorist readers.

according to a report, the FBI and other US law enforcement agencies involved in counter-terrorism have made more than 200 requests for information about borrowers from libraries since September 11.

A list of people who had borrowed a book about Osama bin Laden was among the information to have been demanded since the introduction of the patriot act, the legislation that has enhanced the government's powers to investigate alleged terrorist activity after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

You can direct them to this blog if they don't take you seriously. I know that by doing this I'm doing exactly what the torturers want me to, but if you had read the things I have, you'd be spreading fear too.

By the way, this isn't about surrender, it's about staying safe. There's nothing to stop us from being creative here. You could offer to get their forbidden reading material for them. If you aren't a member of a high torture-risk ethnicity and religion, you may like to put a bit of noise into the library data. As far as I know, there's no way they can track cash purchases of books. We can do what people have always done in these circumstances -- lie low, and take every possible opportunity to subvert the system, and enjoy doing so.