Enacted quickly in the weeks after the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act grants investigative agencies some "very frightening" expansions of powers which, to this point, have not been abused.

Such were the views of librarians Wednesday night at Southern Oregon University as they faced off with an FBI agent who said investigators are only trying to "balance security and privacy" as they work in the business of "trying to prevent the next 9/11."

At a well-attended forum called "Libraries, Censorship and the Internet in the Era of the Patriot Act," participants said the law doesn’t open library records to investigators, but neither does it bar them — and that investigative incursions into private records are likely to get much more aggressive if there’s another big terrorist attack.

"Absolutely, they will," said Patrice McDermott of the American Library Association in Washington, D.C. "If something else happens, all bets are off."

McDermott said that many members of Congress felt they were "railroaded" into passage of the bill, which most civil libertarians find offensive, and would like the chance to "fix excesses" of about a dozen sections, "without taking away the power of law enforcement to do its job."

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The discussion was part of the 2005 Thomas W. Pyle First Amendment Forum series at the university.

SOU library director Sue Burkholder said the Patriot Act forbids her from saying if investigators have ever probed her files for patron information, but does not bar her from saying they haven’t done so.

"I can say I haven’t been asked for information by any investigators," she said.

As a way of protesting the act, many librarians put signs out every day saying "the FBI has not been here today," McDermott says.

Robert Jordan, FBI special agent in charge for Portland, said many people want to "get (the FBI) in a headlock" about the Patriot Act, because the nation’s Capitol is 3,000 miles away "and this is as close as they can get."

But, Jordan added, the Act restricts the FBI on who — and how much — they can investigate and that authority has to be approved by a judge.

Challenged by a member of the audience to spell out what kind of authority FBI agents need to access library records, Jordan said he needs no authority to investigate in a library, but would have to get a U.S. attorney’s approval to use electronic surveillance devices.

As an example — which drew laughter — Jordan said librarians in Portland refused to hand over books used by a bombing suspect, so an agent with a library card just checked them out and fingerprinted them.

The only other time Jordan said he tried to investigate in a library in his 28-year FBI career, he initially was refused access to video of a minor girl being abducted.

Portland-area librarian Candace Morgan, a member of ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, said the FBI’s handling of the "Portland Seven" terrorism investigation has had a chilling effect on library use there. She said the agency’s credibility has been damaged by tactics such as ordering libraries to ship every book mentioning cyanide, when it was investigating the Tylenol murders in the 1980s.

"But," Morgan added, "we need to control the hyperbole on both sides. And even librarians are capable of that."

"We appreciate the difficulty, even the impossibility of your mission, as you fight the war on terrorism," said McDermott, "but privacy needs to be protected at all costs."

Asked what he would do if instructed to conduct an investigation that, to him, was clearly against the law of the land or the Constitution, Jordan replied that "it’s hard to believe the Attorney General would sign something offensive to the Constitution," but that the decision by the Attorney General and FBI director in the late 1960s to keep Martin Luther King under surveillance showed him that "anything is possible."

McDermott agreed, noting that the recent Congressional requirement that states create machine-readable driver’s licenses had only one motive — to make the information able to be shared among agencies, something that’s anathema to civil libertarians and librarians, who are guarding against letting their bar codes get in other data bases.

Morgan and McDermott cited the Internet as the most massive leap in access to information in history, something that librarians and civil libertarians must protect, especially since 9/11. They added the assertion that the U.S. government is, without hearings or adherence to any rules, pulling huge amounts of information off the ’Net and into a "black hole," never to reappear.

John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org