Library, Child Pornography, Personal Privacy, First Amendment Rights, Bacon? What?

[Strangler Lewis]

Composing violent threats is not a crime. Communicating them to the threatened person is. I think there is a crime of attempted criminal threats, and it might consist of typing threats into a draft e-mail as opposed to a word processing program, which is less suggestive of intent to communicate.

Reading about bomb making is not a crime. Taking notes about what you read is not a crime either, but it is suspicious. People generally call the police when they are suspicious about criminal activity being afoot.

What would library policy be if the patron came in and said, "I can't decide what to look at on the internet today. Part of me says hummingbirds. Part of me says kiddie porn. Here's my list of porn URL's if you need one." And he stood there mulling. Would you throw him out? Call the police? Or wait until he had committed the crime.

Copyright infringement, antitrust, money laundering, fraud, etc. are all crimes that could be committed at the library. However, I doubt that librarians--or most people--would feel compelled to report those crimes no matter how strong the evidence was. More to the point, we certainly wouldn't want librarians playing detective with our library usage on the theory that a crime could be afoot.