Confessions of a Mad Librarian

ALA President Michael Gorman was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the USA PATRIOT Act.

He starts off with vim and vigour:

"It's very reminiscent of the '50s and the 'red scare' where people showed up at libraries trying to find which political books professors had read, because they were going to be put on a communist list or something," said Michael Gorman, a British-born librarian who heads the US library group.

But unfortunately undercuts himself (in my semi-humble opinion) at the end:

Gorman said he would be reluctant to go to jail to defend the implicit trusted relationship between librarians and readers.

"To be perfectly honest, I'm a 64-year-old academic librarian," he said. "I'm not going to go to prison over that kind of stuff."

... which begs many follow-up questions, but I'm going to leave it alone.