Notices at libraries warning users they will be arrested if they log on to inflammatory anti-American sites

I'm going to give a talk on anonymity and library use in a few weeks at EPIC's conference, Freedom 2.0 . Suggestions welcomed.

I did a quick search in Infotrac Newspapers for recent articles on "anonymity and libraries" and found this:

The Daily Mail (London, England), April 17, 2004 p16 by Sue Reid Special investigation; Are Bin Laden's fanatics plotting their next atrocity on the internet in public libraries?

I won't paste the article in here (sigh - when you teach copyright, it's hard to do stuff most people just do), but I'll summarize and use a few quotes.

My summary: The Daily Mail reports that it is investigating public libraries as centers for terrorism training. Reid writes that four months ago, a librarian in Manchester was suspicious about the number of multingual men using library computers. The Mail visited public libraries in Manchester, central and West London, Luton, Preston, Leeds and Crawley in Sussex and discovered - "by using computer experts to retrace every website accessed by users - the chilling extent to which they are being exploited. The data we collected is detailed. It shows systematic and regular abuses of library comwrittenputers. For instance, at Manchester Central Library between 11am and 2pm on Thursday, April 8, we found 18 terrorist-linked sites were accessed on the computers we checked. At Acton Library, in West London, two days earlier we monitored the history directories of computers used between 9am and 1pm. Here, six sites linked to Islamic militancy had been opened and read. A day later, we checked computers at Luton Central Library and found that between 1pm and 3pm four extremist websites had been examined. In the Regent's Park Library in central London, eight sites were opened between 9am and 1pm. "

The article goes on in more detail offering specific examples at other British libraries, but this is the paragraph that really stunned me: "In America, the policing of public libraries to detect misuse of computers is already under way. Notices pasted on the walls warn users who log on to inflammatory anti-American sites that they will be arrested."