Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Karl Meyer, an environmental journalist and award-winning non-fiction children’s author who writes frequently about Connecticut River issues from along its shores at Greenfield, Mass.
There are few enough heroes these days, for kids or adults. One of mine, a woman I’m unlikely to ever meet, is enshrined on graying newsprint of an AP story by reporter John Curran taped to my refrigerator since July 20, 2008. She is Judith Flint, a Vermont children’s librarian. Ms. Flint did something extraordinary four years back. She stood up for the privacy rights of her patrons under pressure and the most troubling of circumstances. In doing so, she stood up for us all.
It is National Sunshine Week as I write. Sponsored by editors, library associations and civil liberties groups, the initiative is meant to uphold the principles of open government and freedom of information — and to spur debate of those hallowed ideals. At their root, they are the necessities of functioning democracy. But, what Judith Flint did in 2008 was withhold information — not a generally recognized librarian duty. What makes her a hero in my eyes is that she withheld information from agents of the government: Vermont state police detectives.
The case was ugly; surely deeply troubling to a children’s librarian. A 12-year-old girl had been abducted. She would be found dead a week after the detectives entered Kimball Library in Randolph, stating they needed to take control of all the public computers. That young girl had possibly used one to access her MySpace account. Her uncle, a convicted sex offender, would later be charged with her murder. The detectives, acting on the possibility those hard drives might hold information that might lead them to the girl’s abductors, wanted control of those public, public-library computers. Few requests could be more gut-wrenching.
But in what to my mind was an act conforming to the highest standards of citizenship, Ms. Flint made one demand: show me your search warrant. This was in the incendiary days of the Patriot Act’s ultra-nationalism and national security fervor. We were already over a half-decade into the Iraq War — our costliest, most-Orwellian, mechanized, no-bid contract, overseas expedition ever. Corporate military contractors were bloating; thriving — at the same time a war-weary public surrendered more civil rights daily. The unimaginably huge costs of invading a sovereign state that hadn’t attacked the U.S. were about to be passed on to us citizens, partly in the form of bank bailouts.
Those detectives simply assumed they had a right to those computers. A life was in danger; clues might be inside the millions of bits of information stored on those hard drives — somewhere among data about every citizen-patron that had sat down at computers in that Randolph library. Ms. Flint looked at those detectives — and surely as she did so she thought of that young girl; and certainly she thought about her job, and maybe the possibility of losing it. She likely also thought about what people might believe about her after she settled on her decision. But, in keeping with her promise to guard the public’s privacy while exercising her professional duties to provide access to the information a working democracy requires, Judith Flint refused the blanket request for the vast universe of information stored in the library’s computers.
She told the detectives they’d have to comply with a basic principle of government inquiry: a judge would have to authorize a search warrant — outlining the information being sought. In such a pressing case, it would have taken a phone call. They didn’t make the call. And in not doing so they crossed a line far more important than the horrible one attaching us all to that 12-year-old girl. However well-meaning, they’d lost sight of one of the remaining rights that still has a power to bind us all as U.S. citizens: We have the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures; we have an absolute right to information about our government, as well. Not the other way around.
Some recent developments come to mind as we observe Sunshine Week. Local reporter Richie Davis’ story (The (Greenfield, Mass.) Recorder) on Rep. Denise Andrews moonlighting at a 50 hour a week, global human resources job finding employees for overseas corporations was a true public service. It ran as jobless young people and middle age folks milled around our main streets here with little to do. Newspapers do still hold a power to fulfill democratic goals. Then there were the billions Congress appropriated in a the bill signed by President Obama on Valentine’s Day — authorizing the future saturation of U.S. skies with surveillance drones, easily positioned for blanket spying on citizens. A truly a demoralizing development for democracy, that.
In my little town, government surveillance cameras are now visible from the town common: our once-free “public square.” Shame on us. Still, people like librarian Judith Flint still give me hope. In key ways today’s public libraries are the country’s last true refuges of democratic space. Occupy them; and support your local librarian!
