In today's Boston Globe, Richard Cravatts (identified as a "lecturer" at Boston University) took the Newton, Massachusetts head librarian to task for preventing a warrantless seizure of library records and property.

Cravatts seems outraged that anyone, nonethess a librarian or her American Library Association counterparts, should "stymie the investigative efforts of government officials."  He excoriates her for "protecting terrorists" and acting as a "human shield" by simply demanding that the police obtain a warrant before disappearing with library records.  And in a cheap potshot, he tells her to leave those poor officials alone and get back to "mastering the use of the Dewey Decimal System."

Aside from his contempt for those in the library sciences, Cravatts misses the entire point.  He baldly claims that the librarian and her supports have a profound "misunderstanding of both Section 215 of the Patriot Act as well as the protections provided in the Constitution's Fourth Amendment."  He cites to those ivory towers of conservative "thought" at the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation who claim that the founders didn't really know how bad terrorism could be and therefore couldn't have expected the need for executive searches of libraries. They're concern is misplaced.

The Heritage Foundation "scholar" claims that  ''Americans should keep in mind that the Constitution weighs heavily on both sides of the debate over national security and civil liberties."

He's not quite right.  The Bill of Rights was/is a protection for the people against the government.  Certainly, based on Supreme Court precedent, one would have a lower expectation of privacy when you make transactions in a public space (bank account transaction information, trap/trace devices monitoring the numbers [not content] of outgoing phone calls). 

But when an executive official, without even the minimal oversight of a magistrate judge, shows up at your door, or the door of your library, or the door of your school, or the door of your nonprofit group's meeting, or the door of your public company and demands to seize the computers, I hope - and I'm sure if it came to his doorstep, Cravatts would hope - that there was someone as brave as the head librarian to stand up for his rights. Because it isn't the terrorist's rights she was protecting, it was the rights of the good people of Newton that she was saving.