Time To Update Our Timeline Presenting Movies About Real Journalists Covering Real Public Issues and Events (To Include “Shock and Awe” and “Risk”)

Actors playing real journalists in real events are above, but our chronological list of films about real events in journalism also includes documentaries.

Back in January, National Notice reviewed and considered Steven Spielberg’s “The Post,” which was still in the theaters and campaigning for a number of Academy Awards.  Given that “The Post” ends with a scene denoting it as a prequel to the renowned “All The President’s Men” (1976), it inspired us to also create a timeline of films that have been made about real journalists covering real events.  (See: Sunday, A Timeline of Reporting Dramas: Movies About Journalistic Coverage of Real Public Issues and Events, January 7, 2018.)

Now, with the release of the Rob Reiner directed  “Shock and Awe” in theaters on Friday, it is time to update the chronology of media events the films collectively afford.  We are also grabbing the opportunity to add to the chronology the documentary “Risk,” another documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks the first version of the chronology overlooked.  “Shock and Awe” is about how in the run up to the Iraq War journalists working for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain figured out and reported that the George W. Bush administration was lying and using other similarly unsavory and illicit tactics to propel the United States into an ill advised and ultimately very costly war; and they did this while virtually every other mainstream media outlet reporting was bamboozled by the Bush administration, publishing seriously inaccurate and misleading information as a result.

Our previous posting of the first version of the film chronology explained the criteria for including films in the list and discussed films about journalism and journalism issues that were left out because they were not about real journalists covering on the actual conflicts of our changing times.  The chronology of the films in the list is based on the dates of the events they are about, not the years in which the films were made or released.

The inclusion of films in this list as a resource does not vouchsafe that any of the particular films have gotten it exactly right in terms of the facts.  How valid any film's perspectives is, can bear more discussion.

Here then is a list that presents a chronology in which you can see an evolution of what we have believed has been the role of journalists.

    •    “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005).  Set in 1953, during the early days of television broadcast journalism. Edward R. Murrow along with his CBS news team take a stand and take on the anti-communist fear mongering of  Senator Joseph McCarthy.

    •    “All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone” (2016).  This film covers the legacy of investigative journalist I.F. Stone who died at 81 in 1989, who writing in his I.F. Stone Weekly (1953–71), reported about and during the eras of Joe McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson all the way to Ronald Reagan.  I. F. Stone's life and work, just a portion of the film, is the launching point to review many more recent government lies and their uncovering by journalists since.

    •    “The Post” (2017) and “The Pentagon Papers” (2003).  Both are dramas about the publication of the Pentagon Paper released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study.  The papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times starting Sunday, June 13th, 1971.  The Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles based upon the Pentagon Papers on June 18, 1971.

    •    “All The President’s Men” (1976).  About the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal.  The Watergate scandal began with the incident with which “The Post” ends: On June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills at the Watergate complex finds a door's bolt taped over so that it will not lock.

    •    “Frost/Nixon” (2008). Based on the David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon recorded and broadcast on television in four programs in 1977 in which Nixon climatically admitted his wrongdoing.

    •    “Kill The Messenger” (2014).   Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb, the film takes place in the mid-1990s. Webb uncovered the CIA's role in importing cocaine into the U.S. to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels through the manufacture and sale of drugs in the U.S.  Pressure to drop pursuit of his story Webb published his evidence in the series "Dark Alliance."  He then experienced a vicious smear campaign fueled by the CIA, during which he found himself defending his integrity, his career, his family, ending in his unfortunate death.  (This film somewhat oddly does not show up as readily when googling these subjects as the others do.)

    •    “The Insider” (1999).  About whistle-blower Jeffrey S. Wigand who became famous for his appearance in 1996 on the CBS news program 60 Minutes to reveal that the Brown & Williamson tobacco industry company had intentionally manipulated its tobacco blend with chemicals to increase the addictive effect of nicotine in cigarettes.  The film is about how CBS, with business motivations driving it, was suppressing the story while a smear campaign was conducted against Wigand, and about the ultimate involvement of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in getting the story out.  Afterwards, in real life, the producer of the Wigand segment, Lowell Bergman, portrayed in the film by Al Pacino, went on to work for the New York Times, including working on collaborations with “Frontline.”

    •    “Shattered Glass” (2003).  A film about the embarrassment of how for three years until 1998 many of the humorous and entertaining articles that Stephen Glass wrote for the liberal magazine “The New Republic” were cobbled together from his multiple inventive fictions.

    •    “Spotlight” (2015).   It is based on a series of stories by the "Spotlight" team about the Catholic Church's concealment of its priests' sexual abuse of children that earned The Boston Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. (With news stories appearing from January 6, 2002 to December 14, 2002).

     •    “Shock and Awe” (2018).  “Shock and Awe,” which starts with references to the events of 9/11 in 2001, takes place mostly during the 2003 run up to the Iraq War.  It focuses on journalists working for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, particularly Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, and then  Joe Galloway working under Washington bureau chief John Walcott, and how they were able to figure out that the George W. Bush administration was ginning up and manufacturing bogus reasons to go to war with Iraq.  Although they were able to see and accurately report with well founded documentation that the Bush administration was lying and cherry picking intelligence, together with the fact that going to war in Iraq would be extremely costly and counterproductive, the film is also about the way mainstream media works.  Which is to say that no other mainstream media picked up or reporting the news they published.  Instead, as the film makes the point, in the wake of 9/11 the New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media essentially acted as stenographers for the Bush administration’s propaganda.  In fact, one of the things the film sadly depicts is how the Philadelphia Inquirer, one newspaper in their chain, defected refusing to publish the accurately skeptical Knight Ridder stories about the administration and replaced them with the stories by Judith Miller for which the New York Times ultimately had to apologize because of the were false.

    •    “Truth” (2015).  This film is another about the CBS news program 60 Minutes.  It takes place in the months leading into the US 2004 presidential election (Bush v. Kerry) and tells the story about how CBS News anchor Dan Rather and others working for the CBS program were subject to criticism and lost their jobs for alleged liberal bias in reporting a basically true story about preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard (1968 to 1973 during which time Bush did not show up for a medical exam and stopped fulfilling his flying commitments) when it turned out that documents with which the newspeople had been supplied to support their story were likely faked in whole or in part by somebody.

    •    “The Fifth Estate” (2013), “Underground: The Julian Assange Story” (2012) “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” (2013) “Mediastan” (2013) All of these films deal with Julian Asssange, the founding of Wikileaks (in 2006) and related events through 2010.  “Underground” covers the earliest period of Assange's life (the 1980s and 1990's pre-1997).

    •    “Page One: Inside the New York Times” (2011)  It deals with Times coverage of many things mostly during the time it was made, such as the 2008 bankruptcy of Tribune Media and The Afghan War documents leak, also called the Afghan War Diary, published by WikiLeaks in July 2010.

     •    “Risk” (2016).  The film, another documentary about Julian Asssange, by Laura Poitras, the release of which unfolded in more than one iteration involves events she filmed from 2006 to 2016 ending with the election of Donald Trump.  As such it includes events that overlap with Edward Snowden’s emergence blowing the whistle about illegal surveillance by the United States intelligence agencies.  There is a lot of back story about the connections that the film does not go into in any depth.

    •    “Citizenfour” (2014) and “Snowden” (2016). Respectively, first the film that won the Academy Award for best documentary (like "Risk," also directed by by Laura Poitras) and the subsequent Oliver Stone directed bio-pic that both cover Edward Snowden’s leaks to journalists of classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 concerning the extensive and illegal spying of the US government on U.S. citizens and on others around the world after the 9/11 attacks.

A Timeline of Reporting Dramas: Movies About Journalistic Coverage of Real Public Issues and Events

"The Post" vies for Academy awards in one delivered issue of the New York Times running a front page advertisement, plus a double page interior advertisement that appeared with a promotional interview of its stars, Streep and Hanks.

- *NOTE: Since the publication of this original post National Notice has published an updated list of films that includes, as one of its updates, “Shock and Awe.”  See: Time To Update Our Timeline Presenting Movies About Real Journalists Covering Real Public Issues and Events (To Include “Shock and Awe” and “Risk”), Sunday, July 15, 2018.-  

With Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” currently up and vying for Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and given the way that “The Post” ends with a scene denoting it as a prequel to the renowned “All The President’s Men” (1976), I thought it was time to gather a list of films that have been made  in either documentary fashion, or in dramatic form based on real reporting events that are about the subject of journalism. My interest was in films that are about the duties involved and the issues and decisions that the practice of journalism raises.  . . . I decided that it would be instructive to present them in timeline fashion, basing the timeline, not on the year that films were made, but upon the time period of the actual reporting of those events that took place.

Although I am not endorsing the accuracy with which any of these films convey history, I am including in my list only films that are about the ostensible reporting of ostensibly real events with particular interest in what made the decisions about such reporting dramatic at the time.

There are films that are inspired by real events and are great films about reporting, journalism and the newspaper business, but if those films are too highly fictionalized I am leaving them out.  “Citizen Kane,” (1941), inspired by the life of newspaper publisher `Citizen' William Randolph Hearst, is a great film and raises issues about what gets reported and with what sort of motives and sensationalism, but it is obviously highly fictionalized even if Hearst himself sought to smear/destroy its director Orson Wells and wanted the film destroyed (there is a dramatic HBO film precisely about that: “RKO 281" (1999).  Although my grandfather, Thomas Justin White, was General Manager and one-time president of the Hearst organization I don’t include “Citizen Kane” in the list.  (The film doesn’t happen include any character representing my grandfather).

Other great films on the subject of newspapers and journalism that don’t involve real journalists or real events include the versions of “Front Page” (1931 and 1974) and “His Girl Friday” (1940), “Broadcast News”  (1987), and the savage Paddy Chayefsky satire “Network” (1976).  “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) has scenes key to the plot that depict how critical it is to a villainously corrupt political machine’s control of an unnamed western state for the machine to exercise a monopoly on the information with which newspapers and radio stations in the state supply its population.

I could perhaps arguably include three films that can be watched as a triptych: “Capote” (2005), “Infamous” (2006) and “In Cold Blood” (1967) as being about the death penalty and Truman Capote’s book.  I didn’t, and the last of those films, simply the film made from the book, doesn’t have Capote or a journalist as a character.

If journalism and its ethics is too remote from the central focus of the story (“The Killing Fields” 1984, “Salvador” 1986, and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” 1998) I am not including films in my list, notwithstanding that real journalists are characters in the films.  Maybe I ought to be including “Live From Bagdad” an HBO film about CNN reporting (and yet one more film starring Michael Keaton as a journalist) or “Control Room” (2004, about Al Jazeera reporting, but I don’t know enough about them at the moment.

“Quiz Show” (1994) stands out as a delightfully fun film about a television network's deceit of the American public.  I am not including it since the famous deceit tsk-tsked by the film is with respect to the facts of the NBC television network’s own rigged game shows, rather than the reporting of the facts of important national events.  (It was based on events covered in a book “Prime Time and Misdemeanors: Investigating the 1950s TV Quiz Scandal A D.A.'s Account,” co-authored by Joseph Stone, and my mother-in-law’s boyfriend, Tim Yohn.)  However, a film that could be be made that would arguably make this list would be about another rigged NBC game show that in more recent times did not get tsk-tsked, “The Apprentice,” which helped a misrepresented featured participant, Donald Trump, go on to the U.S. presidency.  . . Yes, although fictional, "Broadcast News" and "Network" were both cautionary about the failure to distinguish news from entertainment, a failure that helped pave the way to Trump's becoming our distractor-in-chief.

Many of the films in my timeline feature whistle-blowers.  In many of the films people pay prices or are very much in danger of paying high prices, including ruined careers, prison or even loss of life, for reporting news the government or the otherwise powerful want to suppress.

There are shorter form, certainly informative documentaries I am not including like Frontline’s, “WikiSecrets,” about the release of alarming information about US military conduct by Bradley/Chelsea Manning through Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.  And, not included, Frontline has covered subjects about manipulation of the media by big and dirty corporate money seeking political manipulation in segments like: “Climate of Doubt” and “Big Sky, Big Money.”  . .  Also not included is an HBO recent 'documentary' about Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, basically the audio-book version of Bradlee’s self-flattering autobiography with pictures, “The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee.”

I am also not including documentary films that are overall critiques about the failure of mainstream American corporate media in general to report reliably, such as “Project Censored the Movie” (2013) or “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism” (2004) that offers a political view about the particular unreliability of Fox News.  I am not including such films even though their skepticism might undermine the sometimes rosy hopes that films in my chronological list sometimes offer about how it is envisioned mainstream media may do its job.

Here then is my list that presents a chronology in which you can see an evolution of what we have believed has been the role of journalists in reporting on the actual conflicts of our changing times.

    •    “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005).  Set in 1953, during the early days of television broadcast journalism. Edward R. Murrow along with his CBS news team take a stand and take on the anti-communist fear mongering of  Senator Joseph McCarthy.

    •    “All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone” (2016).  This film covers the legacy of investigative journalist I.F. Stone who died at 81 in 1989, who writing in his I.F. Stone Weekly (1953–71), reported about and during the eras of Joe McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson all the way to Ronald Reagan.  I. F. Stone's life and work, just a portion of the film, is the launching point to review many more recent government lies and their uncovering by journalists since.

    •    “The Post” (2017) and “The Pentagon Papers” (2003).  Both are dramas about the publication of the Pentagon Paper released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study.  The papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times starting Sunday, June 13th, 1971.  The Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles based upon the Pentagon Papers on June 18, 1971.

    •    “All The President’s Men” (1976).  About the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal.  The Watergate scandal began with the incident with which “The Post” ends: On June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills at the Watergate complex finds a door's bolt taped over so that it will not lock.

    •    “Frost/Nixon” (2008). Based on the David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon recorded and broadcast on television in four programs in 1977 in which Nixon climatically admitted his wrongdoing.

    •    “Kill The Messenger” (2014).   Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb, the film takes place in the mid-1990s. Webb uncovered the CIA's role in importing cocaine into the U.S. to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels through the manufacture and sale of drugs in the U.S.  Pressure to drop pursuit of his story Webb published his evidence in the series "Dark Alliance."  He then experienced a vicious smear campaign fueled by the CIA, during which he found himself defending his integrity, his career, his family, ending in his unfortunate death.  (This film somewhat oddly does not show up as readily when googling these subjects as the others do.)

    •    “The Insider” (1999).  About whistle-blower Jeffrey S. Wigand who became famous for his appearance in 1996 on the CBS news program 60 Minutes to reveal that the Brown & Williamson tobacco industry company had intentionally manipulated its tobacco blend with chemicals to increase the addictive effect of nicotine in cigarettes.  The film is about how CBS, with business motivations driving it, was suppressing the story while a smear campaign was conducted against Wigand, and about the ultimate involvement of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in getting the story out.  Afterwards, in real life, the producer of the Wigand segment, Lowell Bergman, portrayed in the film by Al Pacino, went on to work for the New York Times, including working on collaborations with “Frontline.”

    •    “Shattered Glass” (2003).  A film about the embarrassment of how for three years until 1998 many of the humorous and entertaining articles that Stephen Glass wrote for the liberal magazine “The New Republic” were cobbled together from his multiple inventive fictions.

    •    “Spotlight,” (2015).   It is based on a series of stories by the "Spotlight" team about the Catholic Church's concealment of its priests' sexual abuse of children that earned The Boston Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. (With news stories appearing from January 6, 2002 to December 14, 2002).

    •    “Truth” (2015).  This film is another about the CBS news program 60 Minutes.  It takes place in the months leading into the US 2004 presidential election (Bush v. Kerry) and tells the story about how CBS News anchor Dan Rather and others working for the CBS program were subject to criticism and lost their jobs for alleged liberal bias in reporting a basically true story about preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard (1968 to 1973 during which time Bush did not show up for a medical exam and stopped fulfilling his flying commitments) when it turned out that documents with which the newspeople had been supplied to support their story were likely faked in whole or in part by somebody.

    •    “The Fifth Estate” (2013), “Underground: The Julian Assange Story” (2012) “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” (2013) “Mediastan” (2013) All of these films deal with Julian Asssange, the founding of Wikileaks (in 2006) and related events through 2010.  “Underground” covers the earliest period of Assange's life (the 1980s and 1990's pre-1997).

    •    “Page One: Inside the New York Times” (2011)  It deals with Times coverage of many things mostly during the time it was made, such as the 2008 bankruptcy of Tribune Media and The Afghan War documents leak, also called the Afghan War Diary, published by WikiLeaks in July 2010.

    •    “Citizenfour” (2014) and “Snowden” (2016). Respectively, first the film that won the Academy Award for best documentary and the subsequent Oliver Stone directed bio-pic that both cover Edward Snowden’s leaks to journalists of classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 concerning the extensive and illegal spying of the US government on U.S. citizens and on others around the world after the 9/11 attacks.

Meta-Irony Of Trying To Mount A Social Network Campaign To Get People To See Oliver Stone’s Movie “Snowden” and To Pardon Snowden- How Efforts To Help Snowden Could Be Impeded

"Pardon Snowden": You are entreated to "follow the campaign."  Have You?  Can you?  Have you thought about. . . .

Concurrent with the September opening of Oliver Stone’s excellent new movie “Snowden” about the illegal surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, a campaign heavily supported by social media was launched to have Snowden pardoned.  The campaign has a website, and is using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

There is a meta-irony in this in that, given the tools at the disposal of the National Security Agency, the agency that feels thwarted by Mr. Snowden concerning multiple issues about which they are at loggerheads, social media, may not be a dependable, or entirely serviceable tool.  That’s if you suspect that the NSA may be engaged in more than “passive” surveillance.

In the earlier Academy Ward winning documentary “Citizen Four” about Snowden, Jacob Appelbaum, an encryption and security software developer and journalist, testified at a September 2013 European Parliament hearing investigating NSA searches of EU citizens and companies, told the assembly:

There is this myth of the passive surveillance machine, but actually what is surveillance except control? This notion that the NSA are passive this is nonsense.  What we see is that they actively attack European citizens, American citizens and, in fact, anyone that they can if they perceive an advantage.

Do we need to worry that the NSA puts its finger on the scale to control outcomes?  If so, in which situations and how would we know?  Would the NSA or other U.S. security agencies only do so abroad, and, if so, in a world without borders, where communications, interactions and influence bounce back and forth across the world, does that matter? . . .

. . .  When it comes social media, don’t nearly all of us have foreign Facebook friends or follow people on Twitter who are not U.S. Citizens?

Here is why, when it comes to political dissent or anything that the NSA thinks threatens it, social media may not be a dependable level playing field.  (What might government and the NSA feel threatened by?: Perhaps anything that is not sufficiently normative in their opinion, like believing that Edward Snowden deserves a pardon for his self-sacrificing heroism.)

Laura K. Donohue is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, Director of Georgetown's Center on National Security and the Law, and Director of the Center on Privacy and Technology. She writes on constitutional law, legal history, emerging technologies, and national security law.

Ms. Donohue was a panelist at a New York County Lawyers Association conference, "Government Surveillance and Privacy Have We Reached a Tipping Point," held June 11, 2015.

Those attending learned some frightening things from Ms. Donohue about how readily social networks monitored by the government can also be manipulated by the government:

If you look at the fields of social network analytics, for instance, it has just rapidly expanded. So, in the academic literature there are hundreds of new books, in physics and mathematics and new technologies in computer science about how to do these social network analytics.

. . .  you can look at . . . a person in society, right, any of us, and see what our relationships are with other people, how strong those relationships are by what is called bandwidth, how powerful that individual is, and how to pressure that person by those power relationships. So if, for instance, you are the Democratic administration and you had the Republican-- the RNC mapped out-- their Social networks, you could see who the important nodes were in that network and look at different ways to neutralize them. So you could bring charges, for instance, against them, you could find pressure points and get other individuals to pressure them, you could find ways to isolate them. And that would interrupt the communication network. So you could also use their power to accomplish things in the network.

Does this actually happen?  Donohue continued:

Now this isn't science fiction: The USAID [US Agency for International Development] tried [secretly] to do this in Cuba, I'm not sure how many of you are up on ZunZuneo [slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet]. This was a Cuban Twitter website that the USAID set up in order to build a social network to overthrow the Cuban government. And the idea was that they would start out with innocuous content like weather reports, soccer, music; they would build a social network, figure out where the powerful nodes were in that network and then pressure those nodes to basically bring on a Cuban spring.

Donahue qualified this tale by offering her estimation that, “in the end” USAID’s ultimately failed scheme “was up there with exploding cigars and the Bay of Pigs . . . for good ideas in Cuba,” but stressed that “the idea was” this agency of the US Government was “trying to use the social networks to bring about political change.”

And, she said, these tools are very powerful for bringing about such change over time:

And this is an insight from the literature, which is the reason why social network analytics are so powerful is because networks aren't static: they change over time, people’s actions change over time and their perceptions and beliefs are influenced by others in that network. And so that's one of the reasons why the social network analytics are so concerning.

Notwithstanding that power, Donahue said, “there is a certain irony” that researchers have found these tools are not particularly effective to do what has been set up as the justification for the government’s collection of massive troves of information (“metadata” about people and their relationships): preventing terrorist organizations that have organized along cell systems.

She explained what she referred to as “the snowballing effect”:

If you are looking at a social network, the denser that network is the more you can tell about it, but in a cell structure where they are communicating very rarely and you are dealing with peripheries it's very hard to tell where those important nodes are in a sparsely populated communication network.

So, ironically, it turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool to head off potential social, economic, political opposition and not as an effective way to head off concerted terrorist cell structure activity.

Donahue emphasized that exactly what social network manipulation is effective at, targeting “social, political and economic opposition,” is a major concern.  She further pointed out how worries about such governmental abuse by the founding fathers were also certainly a concern behind the fourth amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure at the time of the amendment’s adoption. She cited the attention that had been given back then to a customs officer who had used information obtained through his position “to go after political rivals in Boston.”  . .  Ms. Donohue has a new book coming out where it is to be hoped we can learn a lot more.

A less than perfectly informed United States citizenry is struggling with what it thinks about Snowden.  What it thinks is already quite subtle, complex and perhaps incongruous.  The intricacies involved in informing oneself and understanding the issues are formidable.

There are polls showing that a majority of Americans think that what Snowden did was beneficial for the country while at the same time a majority feel he should be prosecuted:  See: Time Magazine- Support for Snowden-and His Prosecution- 54% of respondents said the leaker, Edward Snowden, did a "good thing" in releasing information about the government programs, by Zeke J Miller, June 13, 2013 and USA Today- Poll: Snowden should be prosecuted for NSA leaks, by Susan Page, June 18, 2013 ("In a USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll, most Americans say the NSA leaker should be prosecuted, but two-thirds don't like the idea the U.S. government is collecting their own communication records.")

With such a delicate balance, what if the NSA castigating Snowden publicly with the help of Obama and Hillary Clinton and much of the major corporate media, also, behind the scenes, puts its thumb secretly on the social media scales?

In theory we have a system of voter elections so that the American populace controls the government and not vice versa. . .

 . . .  There is, on the other hand, a long list of ways in which one may say that elections have been "rigged."  They run the gamut, some more obvious and hard ball than others . . .  the Supreme Court, with a partisan split, saying that Bush should be president without Florida's votes being counted in the 2000 election where, when the votes were after-the-fact counted, Gore was apparently the actual victor . . . discriminatory purges of the voter rolls as happened in that same Florida election, and as apparently went uninvestigated in the New York Democratic primary this year . . . there's the age-old practice of gerrymandering voting districts which when newer technology like the program "Maptitude" is stirred into the brew becomes exponentially more pernicious . . . . voter suppression and disenfranchisement . . there is the problem of hacking and unreliable voting machines, like with Florida voting machines running backward in 2000 . . . deploying polling place resources inequitably so that some polling sites will get extra speeding-up assistance (like special election laptops in Florida 2000) and others will frustrate potential voters with very long lines. . .  money in politics buying elections and, if that fails, the elected officials afterwards. .  there are the efforts by our two major parties to ensure that the rules of election process skew towards perpetuation of a duopoly. . . then there is the imbalance of a corporately owned press.

Suffice it to say that history shows a longstanding interest in, and efforts at, the manipulation of elections by the powerful and, nearly just as frequently, by those in government wielding government's extra powers.  Some of those efforts because they seem harsh and heavy-handed generate resistance as their reward, but now add to that traditional arsenal the potential soft power of behind-the-scenes social media manipulation that you might not even sense is there.  If effective enough, harsher methods need never be taken out of the cupboard unless they are known to be needed.

With these new technologies it is not just social media that can unobtrusively, subtly manipulate your vote: One of the top under-reported stories of this year is about experiments showing that, using biased search engine rankings, a search engine like Google could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more. . .
 
. . . It is one thing for Google to target you and send you health related advertisements even before you, yourself, suspect you have issues.  It is another for Google to know how you are to vote before you ever get to consider that matter and make the decision on your own.

Finally, what about Snowden?  Are you curious about whether he will actually get his pardon, whether the social media campaign mobilized toward that result could be impeded?  One thing you can do is experiment: You could share this article and the recommendations being made for pardon via the social media platforms you use . .  and then see if you think what you've shared gets as much traction as you would expect.

Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?

Edward Snowden in "Citizenfour"

I was watching the Academy Award-winning documentary “Citizenfour”about Edward Snowden. . . .

. . . I realize as I write that sentence there must, of course, be a lot of people be authoring essentially the same sentence, or its equivalent on computers these days, in emails or in phone texts or via other electronic devices. .

Having watched the film, I realize that the writing of such a sentence will, one must assume, attract attention, in all probability sooner, rather than later, something to take into account even though I eventually do plan to publish the sentence, at which time that publication, and any reaction to it, must be presumed to attract some greater level of additional attention.

This is my first National Notice article about libraries.  I’ve written a great deal about what is happening to libraries in the city of New York where library real estate is being stalked by acquisitive developers, but I am writing here about this issue in National Notice because what I am about to address here it is an issue of national importance.

During the McCarthy era agents of the FBI showed up at the New York Public Library and said that wanted to know what books people were reading.  The librarians were said to be aghast and briefly at a loss about what to do because they recognized the invasion of privacy that this represented.  The solution to their plight, however, was apparently very simple: They took the FBI agents into a room where they showed the agents stacks of call slips for the books.  The agents had no idea what to do with such an overwhelming amount of data, exited and never returned.  This story was told to me by a long-term librarian.

During the McCarthy era there was also concern about what books were available in the libraries, how readily available certain books were and concern about the political leanings of librarians working in the libraries.

Times change and societies transform, often abruptly.  Who would have thought that there would have been a time in the United States when freedom of thought was so perilously threatened? The Nazi era in Germany and the countries Germany occupied also provide examples of how completely countries could change faster than residents could recognize the dire threat they faced in time to flee and save their lives.

Much of the vastly expanded surveillance in the United States documented by Snowden came about abruptly after 9/11.  There had been pendulum swings in both directions before.  The paranoid abuses of government and Nixon’s enemies list during the Watergate era led to new check and balance protections that were gutted after 9/11.

And libraries?  That’s what this article is about: Changes occurring at libraries mean that what you read there probably won’t be private anymore.

Author David Baldacci recently commented to the New York Times:   

Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas.

Indeed, the elimination of books is closely associated with dictatorships and totalitarianism and totalitarian governments are likely interested in controlling thought will be interested choosing what is available to the public to read.  Most recently, ISIS reportedly ransacked Mosul's central library, destroying and burning 100,000 books and manuscripts, many of them reportedly rare and ancient, that did not conform to their notion of what should serve their conception of Islam.

But the surveillance state is interested in something else: The surveillance state wants to know what you think and for that reason the surveillance state believes that libraries should tell the government what you read.

Librarians in Connecticut were the first to successfully challenge the PATRIOT Act when the FBI, along with an accompanying perpetual gag order to keep its actions secret, demanded broadly that the Connecticut librarians turn over to the bureau library records concerning what their patrons were reading and their computer use.

Secrecy was the name of the game.  According to a report of the trial in Mother Jones:

Among the evidence the government had tried to keep secret were quotes from previous Supreme Court cases; copies of New York Times articles; and the text of the Connecticut law that guarantees the confidentiality of library records.

Previously, librarians of the American Librarian Association had, relatively soon after the passage of the PATRIOT Act, fired a shot across the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) bow, with passage of a January 29, 2003 resolution by the ALA Council, criticizing aspects of the PATRIOT Act and urging librarians to be protective of the patrons' privacy.  Librarians were recommended to adopt:

patron privacy and record retention policies that affirm that the collection of personally identifiable information should only be a matter of routine or policy when necessary for the fulfillment of the mission of the library"

Among other strong measures it was urged:

librarians everywhere to defend and support user privacy and free and open access to knowledge and information

The resolution cited among its premises that:

 . . . Libraries are a critical force for promoting the free flow and unimpeded distribution of knowledge and information . . .  that suppression of ideas undermines a democratic society, . . Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association; and, in a library, the subject of users' interests should not be examined or scrutinized by others. .  Certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act . .  threaten civil rights and liberties guaranteed under the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights

And very important to the discussion here it cited:

the likelihood that the activities of library users, including their use of computers to browse the Web or access e-mail, may be under government surveillance without their knowledge.

End of story?  Did the NSA, just pack up its bags and leave, tail between its legs?  Back in the days of the swaggering Bush administration?

What do you think the NSA would do, especially after familiarizing yourself with Snowden’s disclosures concerning the NSA’s secret back doors into all things electronic?

One might suspect that the NSA’s opponents might become even much more of a target.  That was probably likely, but remember that what the NSA does, it does not do out in the open.

Now consider this: Changes are being implemented at libraries, and the changes are particularly apparent in New York City, that would make the heroism of these librarians wanting to protect their patrons’ privacy virtually meaningless except for its symbolism. .  As a practical matter the NSA is probably going to know what you read, just as it always wanted to.

The changes being implemented are twofold:

    1.    An elimination or significant curtailment of the availability of physical books at the libraries that is being pushed even though the public still craves its physical books.

    2.    To the extent that physical books can still be read at the library they must increasingly be requested by computer, often online, and this is more and more often being necessitated by keeping books off-site of the library premises.

Given its multitudinous back doors to technology the NSA will certainly be able to find out what you are reading from the library.  It’s not just libraries: If you buy your books online from Amazon or Barnes and Noble the NSA is probably going to know that too.

When it comes to ebooks it is quite astounding what someone else at a remote location can easily know about your reading.  The publishers of ebooks are not only able to know when you began reading your ebook and whether you ever finished it, they can also determine how long you lingered on each page, what you may have skipped over or chosen to read first. In other words, “just what kind of reader you are.”  See BuzzFeedNews: Publishers Know You Didn't Finish "The Goldfinch" - Here's What That Means For The Future Of Books- The publishing industry's uneasy embrace of Netflix-style analytics, by Joseph Bernstein, January. 21, 2015.

As The Guardian in “Big e-reader is watching you” (by Alison Flood, July 4, 2012) puts things

. . . Would Orwell have been amused or disturbed by the development that Big Brother now knows exactly how long it takes readers to finish his novel, which parts they might have highlighted, and what they went on to pick up next?

Because your ebook, as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal put it, is now reading you right back.

        * * * *

Back to Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four, says Amazon, is the 608th most-highlighted book it sells. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'" has been marked by 349 Kindle users, while "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" has been highlighted by 195. What would George have said?

There is nothing an e-reader publisher is able to know that the NSA isn’t able to find out too.

Also, with digital reading, if the publisher decides retroactively that it doesn’t want you to be reading what it gave you to read, it can make it disappear.  Amazon did exactly that in 2009 when it eliminated George Orwell's "1984" from its patrons' Kindles.  Wrote the New York Times:   

In George Orwell's "1984," government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the "memory hole."

On Friday, it was "1984" and another Orwell book, "Animal Farm," that were dropped down the memory hole - by Amazon.com.

(See: New York Times: Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle, by Brad Stone, July 17, 2009.)

Amazon removed the books and others such as digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand as the most convenient to itself way of dealing with some licensing disputes.  The precedent, however, is truly frightening.  What’s worse is that there is no reason to believe that disappearance or deletions would always occur only in discrete book-size chunks.  It might be just a paragraph or particular phrasing that disappears or is altered, just as it was the job of the Ministry of Information to do in "1984."

The possibilities play out interestingly in a situation like the following.  In 2010, Anthony Shaffer, a former military intelligence officer who was a military spy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, released a book, “Operation Dark Heart,” after getting CIA clearance of its content.  The book was already out and public when the CIA decided to rescind various aspects of its previously granted clearance.  Unsold versions of the book (10,000 copies) were destroyed at government expense.  This led to comically absurd outcomes.  With two versions of the book ultimately in release (review copies were out), exactly what the CIA had wanted redacted was highlighted by the contrast (including, for some reason, a reference to the actor Ned Beatty).  Also, the CIA would not release to Shaffer, a copy of the book that he, himself had authored and submitted to the CIA for review because it was classified.

Of course, we all know how this very same situation turns out in the digital, ebook world: The CIA instructs the publisher to make deletions whenever it decides on retroactive reclassification of previously cleared and public materials, and the readers, if they notice at all, get a feeling of vague disquiet that what they went back to read again is not what they read originally.  If they linger over the particular passage trying to figure out their unease, somebody in a remote location can be taking note of it.

The idea of fluidly changing books is a reality.  The industry is already releasing ebooks that are being re-edited based on reader feedback.  It is a very small shift from this to books that perpetually and fluidly change for other less laudable reasons.

In the end, there is nothing to prevent ebooks from becoming the equivalent of an ever-changing web page.  The old axiom that you can never step into the same river twice would similarly apply.  Ever-changing web pages* may be beneficial in the context of Wikipedia, but where does this lead when it come to books?

(* When it comes to changing web pages there is actually some monitoring that currently occurs.  Would that happen in the case of an e-publisher’s books?)

Government could be the culprit that ultimately makes our ready access to reliable information extremely tenuous, but the undermining of the availability can also come from the private sector.

Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) has testified at New York City Council hearings about the relationship of the privatizing sell-offs of library real estate to the threat of another form of privatization (excerpts below):

 . .  we must be wary that there are many who see the digitized future in terms of an increasingly privatized future where corporations pushing for various plans expect to make a lot of money by controlling digitized information, in many cases, by charging the public for what's already owned by the public in public collections that are being put out of reach.

    * * *

Digital activist Aaron Swartz warned about this disturbing trend:

The world's entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations....The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

In the future we may expect that after the libraries have contracted out to privatize content we will be charged exorbitantly high fees for what was once publicly owned.  The further irony in all of this is that much of the transcription and other work to create digitally available content may have been crowd sourced so that the public will be charged for what it once freely owned and for the result of its own freely contributed work product and intensive labor creating privatized content.

Whether our slipping hold on the knowledge we are entitled to will come from the private sector or from government does not have to be an either/or proposition.  Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who is credited with coining the term “internet neutrality,” has written in his book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” about how the government often colludes with private corporations.  It’s particularly likely when those corporations are monopolies, the very companies the government is supposed to be regulating.

A section of Wu’s book describes how at the same time that AT&T was assisting President Bush to violate federal law pursuant to a secret executive order by assisting the National Security Administration in the warrantless monitoring of telephone and Internet communications on a vast scale, the phone company's pending plans to reintegrate its monopoly were under review by the Bush administration. Congress then, in July of 2008, passed a law granting AT&T and Verizon full retroactive immunity for any violation of the laws against spying on Americans so the full extent of exactly happened has not been investigated and may never get adequate attention.

To put if frankly, it looks like there was a quid pro quo, a trade of rights, in this case, rights to competitive advantage, in exchange for aiding the surveillance state.

There are societal safeguards whenever monopolies are avoided to maintain a pluralistic society.  Surveillance assistance was routinely provided with no objection raised to its illegality by any of the big telecom companies or other large companies, that provided by far the largest bulk of such surveillance.  The first challenge to such surveillance came instead from Nick Merrill, a CEO who ran a small Web-hosting company in New York named Calyx.

Had a few more mergers wiped out the smaller companies, we might never have heard that challenge.

Now let's leave the subject of electronic books to discuss what is happening with respect to physical books.

What is becoming knowable about the individual physical books that library patrons are reading is not quite as granular, but a great deal more is now knowable than ever before.  Books are being checked out electronically.  If you renew your book, you will renew it electronically.  When you want your books you may even specify electronically what library you consider it most convenient at which to pick up that book.  There will be an electronic, again web-based, record of exactly how long you kept your book.  Everything you do electronically can be tracked.

You might go to the library to select and read your book privately, personally removing a copy from the shelves, but more and more under new management practices the number of books kept on the shelves of New York City’s public libraries is dwindling.  Fewer physical books overall and the escalating practice of keeping books off-site of the library premises diminish the chances that you can simply go to any library, or even a central library and expect to find the book on its shelves.   If the book you want is the least bit esoteric or unusual its likely not to be on the shelf. . . in the Brooklyn Public Library you should not expect to find the books of Jane Jacobs without a a preparatory hunt, some not at all.

One thing you can do to adjust for this is to check library records before setting out for a particular library, but if you do, you will probably do so electronically on the internet.  At the library, you might want to figure out what particular section of book could be in. . .  You might succumb and ask your phone (referred to these days as 'personal tracking devices'*) as the quickest possible shortcut.

(* These days they also include built-in fingerprint submission features.)

The NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library- Famously guarded by the lions, Patience and Fortitude, and behind the statues of Truth and Beauty- Behind those symbols physical books are disappearing from the shelves.

At the NYPL’s 42nd Street Central Reference Library, (recently renamed after Stephen A Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, among other things, the world’s largest real estate investment firm, who, without seeming to be that particularly an impressive fellow, just set a record collecting “the highest annual payout ever notched by a founder of a publicly traded private-equity firm”) any of its millions of reference books will now probably be requested electronically, because those books must be if they are off-site as the majority now are.  Those are the books that used to be requested by the physical paper call slip system that once baffled the FBI.

Those research library books will probably be requested electronically whether they are amongst the minority of books still kept at the research library, or amongst the millions more that have been exiled to sites like Princeton, New Jersey.   Only if you are already at the library and want to request a book that is actually there will you have the chance to circumvent a computer request with a paper call slip.

Reverend Billy in Princeton New Jersey where the NYPL sent its books.  From his video.

In August of 2014 the Reverend Billy led a small band of fellow activists out to discover and visit the ReCAP facility site in New Jersey where the NYPL’s books are now entombed.  His plan was to lead a ceremonial “Stonehenge Circle” protest about the books’ removal.  The protest was interrupted, its completion effectively prohibited, because it turned out that ReCAP shares an area of Princeton University with the nearby Forrestal Campus, a complex which has stringent federal security requirements as a laboratory devoted to nuclear fusion and plasma physics research.

Maybe it is unlikely that these books could become inaccessible to the public as the result of an accident or political change expanding federal controls over the area, but what is more frightening is considering the fate of the books that some library administration officials are now intent on bringing about by conscious design.  That can be seen in this report on the ReCAP website: ReCAP-Discovery to Delivery Project- April 1, 2012 through July 31, 2013, Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, October 2013.

When I first heard that million’s of the NYPL’s research books were being moved to, of all places, far away Princeton, New Jersey, I had an initial reaction of, Oh My God, is there some sort of plan where, in the end, the university is going to wind up owning all these books, a reaction I tamped down as paranoia on my part. . . Little did I think I’d eventually learn that this suspicion was not nearly so far off the mark as I’d thought.

From the report, speaking as of 2012, before the NYPL's transfer of even more of its research books

This “Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation” speaks of the NYPL, Columbia University, and Princeton University as being partner institutions with ReCAP.  It envisions that to `manage’ the books `efficiently’ the collection, effectively its ownership, would be “shared.”  The sharing would extend to eliminating many books that were independently owned and identifiable as such in what is euphemistically phrased as a “deduplication” of stock, “deduping” for short.  At the same time, books, now many of them made so much rarer through “deduping,” would be put at risk by allowing them to be borrowed and circulated to “authorized borrowers of any ReCAP partner.”  That would typically be anyone from the universities, students or professors, as NYPL research collection books never circulated to NYPL patrons.  They were considered too valuable.

Also from the report envisioning "deduping"of the shared books

At the same time, the report also speaks of discouraging the reading of the physical books by encouraging that “digital surrogates” of the books be electronically searched before any actual retrievals of books for use.  That’s the  “discovery” of the report’s title.  It would be done (are you listening, NSA?) through a “cloud-based middleware system.”  That system is spoken of as providing “visibility” in “real time status.”  That’s visibility to the users of the library. .  Theoretically.  The report envisions expansion of this “cloud-based middleware system” system to all the libraries’ books.

From the report- "Search and Discover" has been slightly increased in size by National Notice to help emphasize its importance in the structure

This scheme of locating the entire “shared” collection books in New Jersey makes the books sound rather like the family portrait owned on a “shared” basis by a group of siblings except that it is one sibling who keeps it hanging in her own home.  It’s hard to ignore the fact that “shared” books kept on the Princeton campus are most accessible there, especially when the NYPL concedes that transporting books to people who want them in New York is interfered with by things like the Super Bowl.

The NYPL is contributing far more of the books to the “shared” collection than the two universities.  Princeton is contributing the fewest.  According to the report the NYPL had the most books there already, 3.5 million in November of 2012, and noted that “a significant number of additional materials” would come “as part of the NYPL’s Central Library Plan.”  In 2013 the NYPL emptied the research stacks under the Rose Reading Room with more transportations.  Those stacks were historically understood to house another 3 million books, but NYPL president Anthony Marx recently asserted that the NYPL (presumably before any deduping) had determined that 3 million number to be somewhat overstated.

“Deduping” mankind’s knowledge into one central repository where it is intended to be shared may sound efficient, even altruistic, but it reflects a hubristic indifference to how knowledge survives the ages.  Among other things it forgets that one of the benefits of a pluralistic society is the check and balance safeguards that inherently result.  The conservative pro-tar-sands Harper government in Canada is apparently antagonistic to having evidentiary records in its libraries that document and further the understanding of climate science and climate change.  Accordingly it’s engaged in a wholesale destruction of the contents of its national libraries, including:

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger's 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age.

In that particular case, however little the consolation, a copy of the logs was later found overseas.  That is all we have that mitigates such tragedies when the occur.

The Great Library of Alexandria famously failed.  The myth is that it met is demise in a single catastrophic fire.  Actual fires may have seeded the myth, but the more encompassing explanation is that the library slowly degraded and fell apart in serial destructions over a prolonged period, lack of funding being one of its problems.

Image from Wikipedia: The Library of Alexandria- by O. Von Corven - Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, Alfred Hessel and Reuben Peiss. The Memory of Mankind.

The Alexandrian library was intended to be a central repository of all of mankind’s knowledge, something it  probably largely achieved.  It built up its stock of books in a commandeering fashion.  Whenever a ship came into the port of Alexandria all of its books had to be presented to the library for copying by the library’s scribes.  But when the copies were made, books were returned to the ships.  Reputedly some copies were so good that the ships may not have known whether they got back an original or a copy.

Although ultimately the Great Library of Alexandria wasted and then vanished, the copying that created duplicates meant that, at least as much of mankind’s knowledge survived as if the library had never been created, had never commandeered the knowledge into its collection. . . .

. . . It is the job of lawyers to envision the worst when drafting agreements (I am a lawyer), and the lawyers who drafted the book-sharing partnership agreement to which the NYPL was to become a party envisions that it is ultimately possible the consortium will unwind.  At that time there will be a legal hell of ensuing complications and extra expenses.  Even without a total unwinding, minor reversals or retrenchment of some of the decisions carried out could encounter bureaucratic obstacles such as if the NYPL wanted to, for the sake of increased convenience, return books contributed to the shared collection to stacks on its own premises because certain books (referred to sometimes in the report as the “artifactual” original physical copies) were in frequent demand for retrieval.

The collapse of the NYPL's Central Library Plan was big news

In May of 2014 the NYPL’s Central Library Plan dramatically unraveled. In part because it was going to cost an astronomical amount for what was essentially a drastic shrinkage of library space and services, more than one half billion dollars.  That half billion was at least $200 million dollars more than the NYPL had previously publicized.   As envisioned in the report, in 2013, before the plan fell apart, a significantly important part of the NYPL’s collection, an additional three million or so of what were probably the library’s most accessed books, had been transported off premises out of the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. . . .

. . .  Notwithstanding the rather abject and embarrassing failure of the Central Library Plan the NYPL announced that it did not intend to return these books to the stacks from which they had been taken.  The NYPL maintained that the 110+ year-old stacks that had always been the collection’s home were no longer suitable for their original purpose despite appropriate upgrades over the years.  The cost of any further upgrade of the stacks to make them suitable for return to service was dismissed by the NYPL, ostensibly as prohibitive.  While that was the reason given, there are many who think the NYPL simply wanted to continue to keep the books off premieres, and one must wonder to what extent the grip of these “sharing” arrangements presented a force that countervailed against the collection’s return.

Legalities pull both ways, creating a sort of tug-of-war.  The report, speaking before this additional major shift of the NYPL’s collection materials, noted that, “The controversy over NYPL's Central Library Plan may affect planned transfers to ReCAP.”  That escalating controversy ultimately became, among other things, three lawsuits that delayed and helped derail the plan, two of which I was involved in as a co-founder Citizens Defending Libraries, one of the plaintiff parties.  Similarly the report noted, “a strict NYPL deaccession policy may complicate deduping.”   Expressed more forthrightly, that second statement translates to an admission that getting rid of books that a library owns is likely to legally violate the duty of care impressed when possession of those books was entrusted to the library. . .entrusted to the library and its Board of Trustees.

Although there are also the issues we have just just reviewed above of whether knowledge will be preserved and readily accessible with the NYPL sending its books off-site to ReCAP, the overarching concern of this article is the issue of privacy of reading and thought when library collections become accessible only through computers.  That concern increases exponentially when books are kept off-site.

The intermediation of computers to access books at the library is intruding into the libraries in another way.  In the old days you could, and were likely to, speak to a reference librarian when you hunted for books that would serve your research and mental explorations.  You were likely to speak to that reference librarian in person and that reference librarian was likely to have beliefs, per the 2003 ALA resolution quoted from near the beginning of this article, that your privacy using the library should be defended.  Now there is a move afoot amongst library administration officials to substitute off-site computer-based services for these formerly in-person services.  These electronically managed services may be supported by running requests through analytical algorithms, possibly supplied by the likes of Amazon and may even, in the future, simply be handled largely by computer robots. . .

. . . Robots?  (And Senator Joe McCarthy and his minions once worried about the political leanings of librarians?)

In New York City, the best analysis and explanation for why libraries, more used and in demand and than ever, have been targeted for sale and shrinkage with the concomitant elimination of the books and the librarians used to occupy their space is that this serves the interests of developers looking to grab their real estate.  It should be understood that plans respecting those library real estate ambitions began to emerge around 2005.  Groundwork relating thereto may date back a tad earlier, perhaps a year or two.  Although there is a decided convergence of interest between those who would like to grab library real estate and those who want the use of libraries to be less private, that does not mean that there has been any effort by those with these interests to work together or cross-support each other.

In considering aligned interests one should also think about the increasingly monopolistic corporations providing content electronically with whom the NSA regularly gets entwined.

The sale and shrinkage of New York City libraries was initiated and handled largely by the NYPL's Chief Operating Officer, David Offensend, who came from Evercore, a spin-off from Schwarzman's Blackstone Group, until he was replaced by Iris Weinshall, Senator Charles Schumer's wife.*  More or less contemporaneously with Offensend's efforts at the NYPL, Offensend's wife, Janet Offensend was involved in implementing similar plans at the Brooklyn Public Library.

(*  Weinshall came to the NYPL from CUNY, the City University of New York, where she had handled some somewhat similar and related matters.  The NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library was designed to function on an integrated basis with CUNY's in the same building on 34th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues.)

If one were to guess when the NSA might have wanted to mobilize to decrease the privacy of library use one might have guessed that it would have viewed the January 2003 American Library Association resolution calling for a defense of libraries as havens of privacy as a call to, instead, target these declared sanctuaries.  2006 was the year that the U.S. government backed off in its litigation with the Connecticut librarians, finally settling and allowing the librarians to speak about the FBI’s previous pursuit of library usage records under the PATRIOT Act.

There are those who feel secure, because they see no evidence to the contrary, that surveillance is benign so long as it is only used to prevent clearly illegal, bad acts such as terrorist attacks.  “Citizenfour,” the Snowden documentary, however, presents challenge to the notion that the NSA always acts in in such a restrained and circumscribe fashion.  There a number of references to private companies collaborating with the NSA.  For advantage? To avoid disadvantage? Or just because they feel legally compelled?

From "Citzenfour": Glenn Greenwald speaking to the Senate in Brazil

In one scene of the documentary, Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story, subsequently addresses a Brazilian Senate hearing on NSA spying held in Brasília, Brazil. Speaking in Portugese, he says (the film’s translation below):

First of all, Americans’ justification for everything since the September 11 attacks is terrorism.  Everything is in the name of the national security, to protect our population. In reality, it's the opposite.  A lot of the documents have nothing to do with terrorism or national security, but with competition between countries, and with companies' industrial, financial, or economic issues.

    * * * *

The US government has the ability to get not only metadata, but the actual content of your email, or what you say on the phone, the words you type into Google searches, the websites you visit, the documents your send to colleagues.

This system can track nearly everything that every individual is doing on line.  So if you are a journalist investigating the American government, if you work for a company with American competitors, or if you work in human rights involving the American government or any other field, they can easily intercept your communication.

From "Citzenfour": Appelbaum before the European Parliament

A little later in the film, Jacob Appelbaum, an encryption and security software developer, and journalist testifies at a September 2013 European Parliament hearing investigating NSA searches of of EU citizens and companies, telling the assembly:

There is this myth of the passive surveillance machine, but actually what is surveillance except control? This notion that the NSA are passive this is nonsense.  What we see is that they actively attack European citizens, American citizens and, in fact, anyone that they can if they perceive an advantage.

Do we need to worry that the NSA puts its finger on the scale to control outcomes?  If so, in which situations and how would we know?

Oscar night: Oscar to Laura Poitras, standing with Glenn Greenwald on the left for "Citizenfour" and Oscar to Graham Moore for "The Imitation Game" on right.

Another film that took home an Oscar the same night as “Citzenfour,” also about espionage, could provide some insight into the way NSA may be behaving.   That was “The Imitation Game,” that took home the Oscar for best adaptive screenplay.

From left to right:  Alan Turig, Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turig and Julian Assange, and Julian Assange appearing in "Citizenfour."

Spoiler Alert!: Several significant reveals in that film’s plot are key in giving that film a provocative depth and they apply to the questions we probably, if past is prologue, need to take into account when guessing what the NSA might being doing.  “The Imitation Game” is based on actual historical events concerning the breaking of Enigma, the Nazis’ encoded communications during World War II.  It is a mostly, if not perfectly, accurate.  (Humankind does exhibit a partiality for simplifying historical narratives.  How that makes our race vulnerable to unfortunate manipulations will have to be saved for discussion another time.)

The first plot reveal of “The Imitation Game,” not much of a reveal at all if you know the tales of the time, is how the Nazi code was broken.

After that, you learn in the film’s ensuing reveals:   

    1.    After the Nazi codes were broken, the intelligence community (MI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service) modulated their interventions into the war, intervening only selectively, sometimes intentionally not using available intelligence and allowing battles and military assets to be lost so that the Nazis wouldn’t perceive by any change in the pattern of outcomes, and would remain unable to detect the surveillance or any tell-tale interventions based thereon.

    2.    A main theme of the film was highlighted by the Oscar acceptance speech of screenwriter Graham Moore, who spoke of wanting to commit suicide as a 16-year-old: Those who are different, and out of the conventional mainstream who may seem weird or like misfits, even societal pariahs, often have very important gifts to offer.  The unfortunate reveal is that even after such individuals may have proved in exemplary fashion how valuable the gifts they offer are, society’s prejudices and demands for conformity may ultimately destroy them nonetheless.  The code-breaking protagonist of the film, Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the modern computer, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is portrayed as socially awkward, somewhat along the Asperger’s spectrum, but more importantly, as a misfit, he is in the end tragically persecuted for his homosexuality. The British intelligence agency he helped stands by, not coming to his aid.  Worse, even before that persecution, the intelligence agency manipulatively blackmailed Turig.  (Interestingly, Benedict Cumberbatch played Julian Assange in 2013's “The Fifth Estate.”- Assange makes an appearance in “Citzenfour” working to assist Snowden get to a country of political asylum.)

    3.    The last reveal is that the intelligence community, able to operate in secret, is unaccountable.  Those running the intelligence community decide that they know better than Churchill how to manage the sharing of information with the Soviets (allies during the war).  Therefore they cut the British Prime Minster out of the picture in order to share more information.

Since World War II the Unite States and British intelligence agencies have been largely cooperative and coordinated.  These days that means the NSA and GCHQ.

Here would be as good a place as any to sum up with some questions.  When you use your library these days, is your library use private, as was once intended?  Or is your library yet one more place that you are being watched?  It probably is.  Also pertinent to ask: When you go to the library are the changes you may encounter changes that are being made because they are good for you, or because those changes are good for those wanting to watch you?  In New York that means, for instance, you’ll probably ask about all those books that are getting increasingly hard to find.  Asking these questions should get you around to asking another set: Is what is good for the NSA always good for the rest of us?. . .

. . .  If it isn’t, what do we need to know about how and why it isn’t?

If you think these are questions well worth asking you might want to email or phone your friends that: “There is an interesting article in National Notice asking interesting questions about the NSA and privacy in our libraries,” but, given the Snowden revelations, you’ll have to assume communicating such a sentence will attract attention.