The American people surrender their right of privacy when they buy books in bookstores or borrow them from libraries, Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant declared in a letter to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont last month. Last summer, Leahy questioned the Justice Department about its vastly expanded authority to search the records of bookstores and libraries under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. "Do you think that library and bookstore patrons have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in the titles of books they have purchased from a bookstore or borrowed from a library," Leahy asked. On December 23, Bryant replied:

"Any right of privacy possessed by library and bookstore patrons in such information is necessarily and inherently limited since, by the nature of these transactions, the patron is reposing that information in the library or bookstore and assumes the risk that the entity may disclose it to another."

Bryant is wrong. Bookstore customers buy books with the expectation that their privacy will be protected. If he is in any doubt about this, he can ask Kenneth Starr, who outraged the nation by trying to subpoena Monica Lewinsky's book purchase records - or the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court who voted unanimously to suppress the search warrant issued to the Tattered Cover Book Store.

The Justice Department's hardline on bookstore and library privacy makes us all the more grateful to Congressman Bernie Sanders, who has promised to try to amend the Patriot Act to eliminate this threat. ABFFE urges booksellers everywhere to e-mail or fax a note to Sanders expressing their thanks. His e-mail is bernie@mail.house.gov. His fax is (202) 225-6790.

To no one's surprise, the Justice Department this week refused to reveal how many times it has used its power under the Patriot Act to subpoena the records of bookstores and libraries. Thursday was the deadline for the department to announce what documents it would turn over in response to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in October by ABFFE, ACLU, the Freedom to Read Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. While 200 pages were produced, none of them contained any of the information that the plaintiffs are seeking. They will now try to persuade a judge to force the release of the information. A hearing is expected in late February or early March.

The New York State Board of Regents has been caught cheating. Last year, after protests by 18 organizations, including ABFFE, the Commissioner of Education promised that his department would stop censorsing literary excepts on the Regents' English exam for high school students. But a review of the June and August exams reveals that the board is still eliminating references to race, religion, ethnicity and other "sensitive" or potentially controversial subjects. The best example from the recent tests is a passage from Kafka.

The original:

"If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."

The Regents' version:

"If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us."

ABFFE has signed a letter demanding that the Commissioner of Education immediately hold hearings on this problem.

Meanwhile, ABFFE has also joined a statement applauding the Chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley for overruling a university official who wanted to censor anti-war statements by anarchist Emma Goldman, who died in 1940. The remarks appeared in a fundraising letter that the university's Emma Goldman Papers Project had planned to send. The official believed the quotes were too sensitive politically considering the United States may soon be at war.