According to the American Street, there’s a library out in Washington that’s standing up to the Patriot Act. Drop them a line and say “thanks,” and if you’re capable, drop them a couple of bucks as well.
Related Posts
Middle-earth according to Mordor – Laura Miller – Salon.com
Middle-earth according to Mordor – Laura Miller – Salon.com. Because Gandalf refers to Mordor as the “Evil Empire” and is accused of crafting a “Final Solution to the Mordorian problem” by rival wizard Saruman, he obviously serves as an avatar for Russia’s 20th-century foes. But the juxtaposition of the willfully feudal and backward “West,” happy with “picking lice in its log ‘castles’” while Mordor cultivates learning and embraces change, also recalls the clash between Europe in the early Middle Ages and the more sophisticated and learned Muslim empires to the east and south. Sauron passes a “universal literacy law,” while…
Dissertation Online
For those who care, my dissertation is finally online at UMI (if you are at a subscribing institution, I’m sure you know the link to use). Search under “Rashid” for name and “dust” for the title. You should hopefully get my dissertation. It is available via Open Access, so free PDF downloads for all. UMI butchered the illustrations and tables in the scans, so if those things are important to you, drop me a line and I’ll send you a clean copy. Rashid, Hussein. “A Handful of Dust: Reading South Asian (Im)migrant Identity in Islamicate Literatures.” PhD, Harvard University, 2010.
Reading the Qur’an – Part 2 – Interpreting and Translating
Finally, I’m getting around to writing the second part of my three part post on Reading the Qur’an. (Parts 1 and 3) The catalyst for this event was this post by Abu Dilbert (yes, that Scott Adams). Part one of the series talked about the Arabic of the Qur’an and scholarly apparatus of the Sunni community that developed to deal with interpreting the word of God. The idea that God’s word is not necessarily clear to humans should come as no surprise, and when you introduce translations, the problem is further compounded. Most Muslims view any translation as actually an…
2 thoughts on “PATRIOT Act refused. A truly patriotic act.”
Comments are closed.
Here’s a link to the story without the brain-dead cheerleading on American Street,
http://www.komotv.com/stories/33363.htm
And what’s the good news here, exactly? Civil liberties and law enforcement are at times competing interests, but neither is an absolute good. It’s not only wrong legally, but wrong practically, to argue that government in a criminal investigation may NEVER discover who checked out a book in a library, i.e. the library as “haven” theory. Why should a library become a haven for criminal activity because it’s a library?
On the other hand, more reasonable minds have argued that the issue with the Patriot Act amendments is that the provisions minimize or do away completely with judicial review. This, to my mind, is a plausible objection to some provisions of the Patriot Act amendments. This position asserts that libraries aren’t “havens,” but that government CAN discover who checked out a book upon application to a court with appropriate procedural protection (articulable facts that show the relevancy of the requested information to the investigation, etc.). Judicial review is a cardinal principle of due process in cases where such process is due.
Tony, I’m actually trying not to advocate “havens.” I know that when I make purchases with my credit card, those purchases can be tracked. I have entered into an implicit trade-off between my privacy and convenience. However, I do believe in the power of judicial oversight. I don’t expect this library to win the larger argument they are making about never having to release patron records, but I do hope that they help to get some of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act overturned. Any time there’s any resistance to this law, I think it’s a good thing.