The USA PATRIOT Act has been on my mind recently for a number of reasons. First, while at AALL in July, I wrote an article about the Hot Topic presentations on the Act. This article, Hot Topic Sparks Better Understanding of USA PATRIOT Act, has been published in AALL Spectrum, Vol. 7, Sept. 2002, at 16 and is finally available on the web. It's on page 12 in the online PDF version.
Second, I recently gave a presentation on the USA PATRIOT Act for a class of library science students. The PowerPoint version is here and an html version is here. I want to give credit to the ALA's Washington Office for their presentation, Libraries and the USA PATRIOT Act: Access, Openness, and Confidentiality, which I used as the basis for mine. I modified this to provide some basic legal information for the library students and to go into more detail on FISA, pen registers/trap & trace, etc. I also prepared a resource list, USA PATRIOT Act & Related Issues. Out of the 30 students, at the beginning only one acknowledged that she'd heard of the Act before. Between my presentation and the instructor, we had them fairly riled up by the end of the 2.5 hour class. They seemed to realize that librarians need to become advocates for the issues they believe in. I felt like I'd actually accomplished something.
Finally, on a somewhat related note, Bibliolatry pointed to this article today on the impact the removal of government information from the web is having on researchers. Several of the slides from the ALA (and my) presentation deal with how to determine what should be removed and who should determine it. No one has a handle on this issue, really, and it's hard to say who should. I'm just glad there are folks like OMB Watch and others who are keeping track of what's been removed.
2:28:30 PM 
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