The Connecticut Four have been honored with multiple awards, which came with their own challenges. At one point during our meeting in Hartford they veered into a conversation about an award that came with a monetary prize, and they were still trying to work out the technical details of passing the money on to their library boards. Nocek said she could live without reporters asking to follow her home. “One of them wanted to ride the train home with us after a press conference,” she said. “I wanted to say, ‘That’s enough for now!’” But the attention was welcomed by Christian and Chase, the fathers who had lied to their sons for a year. Christian said that one organization honoring him had offered to fly his son to the ceremony, too, news that delighted the librarians. Dad wasn’t a criminal, after all. On the contrary, he had been defending the Constitution.
The storm had quieted. The lunch crowd at the Mark Twain Museum had long scattered, but Christian wanted to explain something important before he and the others went back to work. “When the Patriot Act came out, librarians were very concerned. There are all kinds of provisions that came with gag orders.” Christian had educated himself on the subject, attended legal seminars, met with other library consortia in Connecticut, and talked with them about jointly hiring a lawyer who could advise their member libraries on policy. “But then Attorney General Ashcroft said librarians were being hysterical; the Patriot Act has never been and never will be used against libraries. So we all went on to other things.
“But I had learned [from all those meetings] that you have to have a policy that whoever is in charge is the only one who can authorize the release of information. Everybody at Library Connection understood that if anybody came in the door asking for information, the answer was, ‘I can’t help you; you have to talk to the executive director.’ If we hadn’t gone through this drill, government agents could show up on a Sunday afternoon or Friday night or whatever. It’s the FBI. They talk to some low-level minion. They flash their fancy badges and say, ‘Look, it’s national security; you’ve really got to help us out here.’ Who’s not going to say, ‘Of course I’ll help you out; what do you need?’ And then after you give them the information, they say, ‘Oh, by the way, you can’t tell anybody we were here.’”
I thought of Rosa Parks, who had not been the first person of color to refuse to sit in the back of the bus but the first who refused to sit in the back and was also able to mount a long legal challenge. “You were prepared,” I said.
“We were prepared.”
They had planned for the knock on the door. They had drilled as if for a fire. They had centralized the usual bureaucracy of libraries and library consortia in case they needed to act, and when the time came, they had been ready for the challenge to the privacy of their patrons. It wasn’t rhetoric. It was nuts-and-bolts and books-and-bytes teamwork.
What happened to the Connecticut Four occurred during the Bush era. But that couldn’t happen again—or could it? The law authorizing secret searches by the FBI, unchecked by judicial oversight, extended until the last day of 2009 and has the support of the current attorney general, Eric Holder. The Safe and Secure America Act of 2009, introduced in the House in the spring, proposes extending this intelligence-gathering tool for another decade. The law is not going away. How many of our library records have been seized? The Office of the Inspector General estimated that more than 143,000 national security letters were issued between 2003 and 2005, but cautioned that these statistics “significantly understated” the actual amount. Chances are very good that your library use has been scrutinized by the FBI.
During the height of the debate about the Patriot Act, some librarians posted signs that were “technically legal,” slyly warning patrons that their privacy might be compromised:
THE FBI HAS NOT BEEN HERE
(watch very closely for the removal of this sign)
There is no registry of libraries that have posted such signs, so there’s no telling how many have since been removed. The reauthorization of the Patriot Act explicitly permits those who receive national security letters to consult a lawyer. It also explicitly adds a criminal penalty for “unauthorized disclosures.” Librarians who post those warning signs now risk a five-year prison term.
6.
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Imagine activists around the world, wired to each other and to the world’s information resources, each capable of measuring the impact of drought, or tracking the efficacy of a prenatal clinic….
Almost everything about the scene was old-fashioned, even ancient. The setting was Rome, which sits on ruins. The librarians at the heart of it shared traditional values; one had a background in medieval philosophy. The principles at work were thousands of years old, rooted in charity. In fact, in almost all ways but one, these librarians inhabited an older and timeless world. But their mission had a quintessentially modern twist. They were teaching the others in their community how to video chat; how to post photos to Flickr; how to use GIS, geographic information systems; how to zip around the Internet; how to bend their laptops to the cause of social justice around the world.
Ever since I’d heard Kathy Shaughnessy, the librarian from St. John’s, speak at the American Library Association convention about her cyber-missionary work teaching computer skills to students from a wide variety of countries, I had been eager to see her and her team in action, in Rome, where St. John’s had a campus.
Shaughnessy’s mother was a high school librarian who was fascinated by computers and convinced they could be useful in libraries. Under her influence, Kathy, the youngest of seven, studied logic and programming, and turned into the sort of person who couldn’t wait to test the new software. After completing coursework for a Ph.D. in medieval philosophy, she moved on to her mother’s profession. A “cradle Catholic,” she measured her work by standards of social justice. “I like to look at the world and see how it is, and how it can be—how it could be—a little bit better if it was better organized. And the ability to access information and the ability to use computers—I see not being able to do those things as an injustice.”
Shaughnessy’s computer skills and philosophical background made her a good fit on the St. John’s library faculty. She worked closely with the vice provost for distance learning and director of the Division of Library and Information Science, a visionary who was building the infrastructure for a university without geographic limits. In the nine years Jeffery Olson had been working on distance learning for St. John’s, students had gone from not being able to pay fees or register online to being able to get a degree while living in Rwanda or India. (The university had also, incidentally, been named one of PC Magazine’s top twenty wired campuses in 2006.) Olson’s team was equipped to launch this program before it had even been conceived.
Now Olson, Shaughnessy, an assistant professor and instructional services librarian, and Kevin Rioux, an assistant professor in the library school, were about to dispense laptop computers and digital cameras to their third class of international students, some of whom had never touched a computer. The job of the St. John’s library team was to teach the students what they needed to know technologically, create an activist community across language barriers and time zones, then send them home, where the students would complete their master’s degrees online over the next two years, write their theses, and, oh yeah, save the world.
I had been to Rome before—a pagan Rome, littered with half-excavated archaeological sites and crisscrossed by sleek women in high heels on Vespas. The Rome I saw this time, following Shaughnessy, was a company town, Catholic to its core. To get there, you left the urban heart, its fountains and cafés, the pines and palms and the crumbling walls of the old city, even the ancient bejeweled churches, and took the good subway, the air-conditioned one that rumbled beneath the city and emerged over the Tiber River, the Vatican glinting just long enough for a wave goodbye before the metro chariot plunged back underground and sped you nearly to the end of the line. One steep escalator after a
nother pulled you from the center of the earth into a city drained of charm and beauty, a big traffic corridor, no shade, vendors selling cheap purses, batteries, baby clothes, and in the distance, a McDonald’s, the landmark where you turned onto via Aurelia and headed west toward the Idente residence, a missionary training facility that served as home base for the St. John’s master’s students.
I walked for half an hour in the Mediterranean sun, past car dealers and gas stations and mysterious institutional buildings, the only pedestrian lurching along the commercial thorough-fare—whiz! honk! whonnnnnk!—barely a word of Italian in my quiver, the least likely pilgrim on the planet. Shaughnessy, in a flowered skirt and radiant smile, welcomed my limp and bedraggled self into the placid interior of the building, where long pale-green vertical blinds kept the atmosphere cool and hushed. There were austere dorms upstairs, a cafeteria downstairs, classrooms and an open lounge with polished granite floors on the main level—and free wifi throughout. The students walked around shyly, nodding and smiling, the Indian women, the Caribbean men, most in their thirties and early forties. Many of them were already nuns and priests, missionaries and human rights workers; this program would wire them and give them a scholarly foundation. The newest class was immersing itself in information resources, economics, and theology classes, all of it in English, though most spoke multiple languages. The first class had reunited after two years of staying in touch by computer. They were now winding up their studies and preparing to graduate.
A vending machine dispensed perfectly fine cappuccino for half a euro, so I sat and sipped and watched the students swirl past as Shaughnessy pointed out some of the members of the Social Justice team. Sister Margaret John Kelly, tall and austere, in plain white shirt and dark skirt, a cropped veil hiding her trim gray hair, turned the corner with Dr. Annalisa Saccá, who was petite and dramatically made-up. A contessa with jewels on almost every finger, Saccá wore heels and a swirly skirt, her hands and face in constant motion. Two styles of women, one goal.
As Saccá told me later, she and her dear old friend Dr. Riccardo Colasanti, the secretary general of the Catholic charity Caritas of Rome, were having dinner one evening in the city, and Colasanti was confiding his frustrations. Caritas was pouring tons of money into charity, but as far as he could tell, it wasn’t making much of a difference.
“How? How?” Saccá demanded, painted eyes flashing and red nails fluttering. “How can we change the world? Really!”
“We must find a new way of educating people!” Colasanti declared. So the two created an initiative on the spot: a graduate program designed to give people around the world some useful tools for promoting social justice: a program that would enable students to remain in their communities while learning how to investigate, document, and fight injustice using the Internet. Imagine activists around the world, wired to each other and to the world’s information resources, each capable of measuring the impact of drought, or tracking the efficacy of a prenatal clinic…
Colasanti would provide the financial backing through his charities, and Saccá would rope in St. John’s, which had established a presence in Rome. They chose “an empty box,” an interdisciplinary master’s program with flexible requirements—a master’s in Liberal Arts with a Concentration in Global Development and Social Justice. Not “development” as in bringing McDonald’s and Monsanto to your village; development in the sense of “realizing the fullness of human life.” The key to implementing the program was the St. John’s librarians and library school faculty, who would teach the students everything they needed to know to be long-distance students, keep them connected, and establish an online community for them. Saccá worked quickly (“She does everything quickly,” Shaughnessy said) to win accreditation, and within a year and a half of her brainstorming dinner with Colasanti, the new master’s program was recruiting students. Fifteen students, most from emerging countries, received full scholarships each year, including travel to and from Rome for their initial training, and again two years later, for their final presentations and graduation. Five students from the United States helped subsidize the program by paying full tuition and expenses, though one shouldered graduate assistant duties in exchange for reduced fees. The program would be technologically sophisticated, but Olson, a tall, smiling man with a gentle manner, stressed that the technological component was “not the end but an important means.” The mission was the point; ThinkPads just happened to be efficient networking and delivery systems.
Every class I sat in on in Rome included a reference to Saint Vincent, the patron saint of the university and its affiliated priests and nuns. Vincent de Paul, a seventeenth-century priest, was a fine model for activists today, so the students were told. He was an advocate for women, slaves, beggars—anyone who suffered discrimination. Vincent believed in free will, equality, and dignity; he was also, according to Sister Margaret John, an organizational genius, a man who could figure out how to get people to support each other in simple but meaningful ways, such as helping a sick family by assigning their neighbors different nights to bring food. “And that’s what we need now,” Sister Margaret John said. “People who are really good organizers.”
It sounded like they were all back-to-basics Catholics with laptops, a humanist message, and a special appeal to women.
“I’m not Catholic,” Olson pointed out. “I’m Mormon.”
Whatever they were, everyone dropped his or her work at lunchtime and trooped to the cafeteria, though, as Shaughnessy said, “It’s much better than a cafeteria. It’s Italy!” No one skipped a chance to break bread together, to share prosciutto and pasta, wine and grapes, the ancient repast.
In a city of thieves—as the guidebooks always emphasized—we all left our laptops, purses, and backpacks on a table by the door, and didn’t give them another thought. The relaxed attention that everyone brought to the conversation, as well as the delicious food, was in civilized contrast to the tourist bustle in Rome proper. I asked Olson at lunch where I could read a history of the program, but he said it hadn’t been written. “It’s a concern to this profession—some of us are so worried about what is getting lost in this era—and we need to do more,” he admitted. Just then a photographer arrived from New York to capture the first graduating class in Social Justice on film. At least there would be a photographic record.
That afternoon, the graduates posed for their portraits in the open lounge. The students slipped up to the dormitory rooms to swap their T-shirts and jeans and sandals for dress clothes. The Filipino and Indonesian men wore the traditional shirts made of pineapple fronds, called barongs. Four young women in vividly colored saris turned a little shy as onlookers exclaimed over their beauty. An African student was resplendent in her bright-red American-style suit. No one passing by failed to stop and compliment them, or offer hugs, or ask if any of their relatives had been able to come for the occasion. One young man’s huge Italian-American family from Brooklyn would make up for those students with no one. A St. John’s faculty adviser came from the U.S., though he had no classes to teach in Rome. He had mentored two of the students and simply wanted to see them graduate.
Not everyone who started the program had made it. But Eugenie Murekatete, who lost her husband in the fighting in Rwanda and was now working at the UN, was graduating; Parnel Saint-Hilaire from Haiti, who had just become a father, and whose baby cooed through more than one presentation that week, was graduating; the Vincentian activist from Indonesia who had kept them all posted during protests, the two men who had disappeared from the online community for weeks after a typhoon in the Philippines—they were graduating, and others, too, a dozen in all.
The first two classes had had audiences with Pope Benedict XVI while they were undergoing their initiation in Rome, further evidence of the religious pull of the program’s founders, Saccá and Colasanti, but he was out of town this year, so the newest class of students missed out. They did get to attend a UN conference, sponsored by FAO, the Food and Agricult
ure Organization. There they saw a parade of international policy makers and critics who put the students’ mission in a secular context, including Vandana Shiva, the Indian physicist and activist, who gave them a short, scorching lesson in the idiocies of global trade policies and preventable starvation. In turn, two of the graduating students got to stand up and address the internationally known speakers. Saccá managed the conference, shuffling name cards at the big table onstage in the UN building near the Hippodrome, as the world activists, Harvard professors, journalists, and policy experts came and went through the day.
During the lectures, I sat next to the anthropology professor who trains the students in the uses of geographic information systems. “It’s the ultimate interdisciplinary tool,” Barrett Brenton enthused, and the parade of speakers with their charts and maps illustrating the feminization of poverty and the proliferation of AIDS orphans was punctuated by Brenton leaning over to whisper, “GIS—see that chart? GIS made that possible.”
The new St. John’s group benefited by being the third class to run the technological gauntlet with the librarians. Shaughnessy and Rioux had spent a week with the first class and two weeks with the next, and keeping them all online and wired through the year had been exhausting. Even two weeks, the librarians learned, was not quite long enough to overcome the students’ cultural shyness, second-language issues, and technostress, and when they left for home, Shaughnessy said, “I felt like I was abandoning them.” A few of the far-flung students never really got the hang of Refworks, the program that allowed them to save and organize all their online sources, turning their desire to fight hunger, disease, and discrimination into scholarly papers; instead they laboriously typed up footnotes and citations, an old-fashioned waste of time. That, Shaughnessy felt, constituted a failure on her part, and “in a few cases, you didn’t know whether they just couldn’t use Refworks or they didn’t have connectivity.” So she and Rioux were staying in Rome with this latest class for the entire month of their initiation. There were opportunities for one-on-one sessions, and classes like this, a whole session devoted to this bibliographic organizing tool.
This Book Is Overdue! Page 8