Strength in Numbers: Library Freedom Is Intellectual Freedom

Hi Alison,

I would like to expand upon the OP's comment with some information about Tor Project's "home town library" (so to speak), the Seattle Public Library system. Some years ago SPL hired a Canadian company, Bibliocommons, to manage its collections catalog, patron records (including checkouts and catalog searches), and "book club" discussions with personalized "likes", etc., in the cloud, specifically Amazon EC3 servers, but with the data analyzed and "managed" as a service by Bibliocommons in Toronto (which is also home to CES).

This means that sensitive information about what the citizens of Seattle are reading/thinking is passing (apparently unencrypted) across the US-CA border where apparently both NSA and CES can intercept and store it. And there is little reason do doubt that they do just that, not because they have a good reason, but just because they can.

(Modern intelligence agencies are information hoarders: any bit of information might prove useful somehow sometime in the future, they believe, so they collect it all and store it all, forever, because it has become technologically and economically feasible to do so.)

Over the years SPL has also been quite hostile (especially in comparison to the King County Libraries system, for example) toward free speech, blocking not only Tor Project but many new sites (years before the new EU laws came into effect).

Many other public libraries in North America (Canada, US, Mexico) also use Bibliocommons to manage their on-line catalogs and patron records. One consequence of this is that should FBI desire to examine someone's reading habits, instead of pushing out an administrative subpoena to an individual library (which might very well fight in the courts to protect their patron's privacy), they can address a blanket subpoena to Bibliocommons for a large fraction of library patron records in North America. In particular, last I checked, New York Public Library (the largest public library system in North America, if not the world) also uses Bibliocommons to manage its catalogs and patron records.

A telling quotation from the founder and CEO of Bibliocommons, Beth Jefferson, speaking to a business audience about the "privacy controls" Bibliocommons offered to patrons:

> At first we went out to users with an interface specifying "public" or "private" nature of their contribution, but most people wanted to keep things private, so we had to reverse the incentives, and shifted the semantics to "share" vs. "hide".

The reason Bibliocommons feels it needs to share patron data--- I am not sure whether they still bother to ask permission--- is that its business model apparently relies on selling patron data. (Bibliocommons was founded as a nonprofit but later became a profit making company, apparently.)

Even more disturbing, much of the personal data SPL holds about patrons concerns data about children, who are encouraged to seek reading and homework help via Bibliocommons managed social media resources.

Another problem is that Bibliocommons does not allow library patrons to prevent anyone else from adding them as a "friend", a security flaw often abused by LEAs and corporate spooks embarked upon a fishing expedition trawling through social media sites (and thanks to Bibliocommons, all SPL patrons are social media users at the Bibliocommons site--- if you have a library card, you have a social media account with them, tied to your real identity).

Further, as we all know (I presume) very serious and essentially unfixable security flaws which particularly affect "cloud computing" were uncovered a year ago, and given such names as Spectre. While some software mitigations have been implemented, the only genuine fix is for chip makers to design entire new families of CPUs which avoid "speculative execution", and for cloud computing services to replace their servers once the new chips become available. Unless someone holds their feet to the fire, I doubt that companies like Bibliocommons and SirsiDynix will do this.

If all this is beginning to sound a bit like Facebook, well, I think the resemblance is disturbing--- and the potential for serious abuse of sensitive personal information is all to real.

In my experience in attempting to goad library systems to address potential security and privacy issues, librarians have disappointed me by becoming defensive, and even attempting to dismiss privacy concerns as unimportant--- an attitude at odds with the pro-privacy ethos which you have described. I hope LFA can work with public library systems to address these issues in a more effective and constructive manner.

Thanks to the OP for speaking up! It's always good to know that I am not alone in trying to warn about the dangers to patrons of technically/legally insecure library sites (especially with regard to checkouts, catalog searches, and patron contact information).