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WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 11 Apr 03 Washington, DC
1. PATRIOT ACT: LIBRARIANS DENOUNCE ASSAULT ON THE RIGHT TO READ. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in haste after 9/11, gives the FBI authority to examine all library circulation records. The law also forbids libraries from informing patrons that their reading habits are being monitored. Libraries across the country began shredding circulation records and posting signs warning patrons that "anything you read is now subject to secret scrutiny by federal agents." The American Library Association urged Congress to repeal the provision in the Patriot Act dealing with library records. Contacted by the Vermont Library Association, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) last week introduced the Freedom to Read Protection Act (H.R. 1157). So far, there are 70 cosponsors.
2. 17 YEARS AGO IT WAS THE FBI'S "LIBRARY AWARENESS PROGRAM." Unfortunately, the goal of the program was not to improve the literacy of agents. WHAT'S NEW stumbled on the story first in 1986 after a trench-coated FBI agent asked a student working at the University of Maryland Physics Library for the record of all books checked out to a visiting foreign scientist. The agent resembled Inspector Clouseau more than Elliot Ness. The student called the science librarian. Maryland is one of 38 states in which library records are protected by law, and in the absence of a court order, the librarian refused. After the New York Times picked up the story a year later, the FBI ran checks on 266 people who had been publicly critical to see if they were part of a Soviet plot to discredit the program. The full story of the infamous Library Awareness Program is told by librarian Herb Foerstel in "Surveillance in the Stacks"(Greenwood Press, 1991).
3. FUSION: SANDIA PULSED-POWER MACHINE PRODUCES FUSION BRIEFLY. At the APS meeting in Philadelphia last week, scientists from Sandia National Laboratory announced that Sandia's Z machine had created a hot dense plasma that caused deuterium fusion. Fusion was confirmed by a burst of neutrons from a BB-sized deuterium capsule. The question, as it always is in controlled fusion, is whether the process can be scaled up. In the Z machine a huge pulse of electricity is used to generate X rays, creating a shock wave in the target deuterium capsule, compressing the deuterium. This must be done over and over in rapid succession while extracting the energy. Well, that's just an engineering problem.
4. ENVIRONMENT: HOUSE VOTES FOR DRILLING IN THE WILDLIFE REFUGE. The Senate had already narrowly rejected the plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. But the Senate will likely reconsider. This is a major energy initiative of the Bush administration, granting big tax breaks to oil and gas companies. The House also soundly defeated a proposal to require a 5 percent reduction in automotive fuel consumption that supporters said would save more oil than the refuge can produce.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY. Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. --- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN You are currently subscribed to whatsnew as: To unsubscribe, send a blank e-mail to: <leave-whatsnew-40801D at lists.apsmsgs.org> To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: <join-whatsnew at lists.apsmsgs.org>