Editorial- "Either Ignorantly or Wisely"

The librarian's job is tougher now. Our job description includes that difficult mandate to serve every person's need for and right to access to information. That mission, our oldest and most important, takes on a higher priority in these dangerous times. The 1852 articulation of the library mandate by the founding trustees of the Boston Public Library reminds us that it is our highest purpose:

.it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order.which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely.

It was a lot easier when our only enemies were a few extremists pushing their narrow view of what sexual information people ought to be able to get in the library. Now we're up against the government of the last superpower and all the elected officials, law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies it can employ to keep people from access to information.

Librarians also face a public clearly convinced that to resist the new secrecy is not only unpatriotic, it is dangerous and even treasonous. It is difficult to decide what role we should play in this highly charged environment. We don't know when to go along with the new secrecy, when to resist it, or when to escalate the fight to some higher political or litigious level.

Our role would be more obvious if the issue were simpler. It is not. We could agree, for example, that there is information related to our nation's undeclared "war" on terrorism that must be kept secret. We can see why technical details about our nuclear power plants, our water supply, and other systems vulnerable to terrorist attack must now be kept secret. We can also see, however, the need for public information about the vulnerability of those systems and how people should respond when they are in danger. A raging debate about information on hazardous chemical sites pits a government-defined need for security against huge environmental concerns.

The problem is further complicated when our political leaders regularly exceed the rational limits of what should be "classified" as necessary secrets. Even before the current war, they repeatedly locked up information in the name of national security because it revealed their unethical or illegal activities. They also want to withhold information to protect something called "executive privilege." They want to lock up the documents of modern history and keep them from us long after they have any sensitivity.

The erratic administration of this new secrecy makes it even more complex. The Government Printing Office (GPO) reacted negatively when one librarian advised her colleagues to remove nuclear regulatory data from public view. Yet a university library clerk immediately destroyed a GPO CD database in response to a GPO letter requesting that action.

Already our allies in the struggle for free access to information are backing off and supporting certain restrictions. Everyone's favorite search engine, Google, is now checking with the feds to make sure that information deleted by the government from its sites can't still be accessed via its automatic functions.

Yet librarians have the job of delivering access to information, even without strong allies or huge popular support. We can't simply allow government to decide the limits of access, nor politicians to legislate away our rights in a flurry of patriotic rhetoric. While we respect legitimate national security concerns, we must quietly resist the extreme application of the new secrecy. We must fight to help the people get the information they need. After all, in a democracy like ours, the people will decide the fundamental questions "either ignorantly or wisely."