Saturday, December 24, 2016

Noticing New York's Annual Seasonal Reflection


From our Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

On this cusp of a new year, as Noticing New York returns here today to its annual tradition of offering a seasonal reflection on the world around us, this year seems a little different.


Our practice of, year to year, of presenting something clever involving traditional tales of seasonal spirit and aspiration to make the point how out-of whack what actually surrounds is, strikes us as weakly redundant of what is obvious, especially with what we now see going on nationally.

What seems more important right now is to offer: "We will all get through this."  . .
Union Square Subway Station: The messages of protest wall that sprang up after the November election.

 . . .   Maybe we say that partly as a prayer or expression of hope, but also because, if we don't, there is no first step to getting through this. . . . The winter solstice has arrived and it marks the return of the sun, which with Yuletide, and in a few days, New Year's, we will lead us to proclaim the start of the new year that leads into spring Even today, the sun is already setting about five minutes later in the evening, extending the day, than just days ago.

The truth is we can do what we need to do with a sense fun at the same time we pursue purpose.  Our Citizens Defending Libraries (I am a co-founder of CDL) meeting/holiday celebration this year (video shared on Facebook) was such an event.
CLICK TO ENLARGE (something you can't do with a library)- A gift to developer David Kramer (in suit) under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade XMass tree this year, the Brooklyn Heights Library, sold for less than the price of a vacant lot, courtesy of Mayor Bill de Blasio, The Brooklyn Heights Association, and Councilman Steve Levin.  Others were involved pushing for this sale, like Saint Ann's.  Kramer here was getting some elf-help from the construction union whom he has never treated well.  The union reversed positions of the public good of the sale when Kramer made some feeble work place safety concessions, sad for them and unwise in that unions wanting to reverse waning support from the public should seek to do so by supporting the public. 
Last, year at this time Mayor de Blasio gave a Christmas present to developer David Kramer handing off to him the shrink-and-sale of the Brooklyn Heights central destination library, the second biggest most important library in Brooklyn, for a minuscule fraction of its value to the public.  Now, that deal is the subject of a criminal pay-to-play investigation by Preet Bharara.  If luck wends in the direction of protecting the public, the matters going to the grand jury respecting de Blasio will halt this sale. . .

. . .  Notwithstanding, this year de Blasio is giving permission to the developers to wreck and demolish the library while it is still city owned.
The shrink-and-sink sale of the library means goes along with a huge reduction in available books
The work has been done so carelessly, with so little regard for the public, that shards of loose construction debris have been allowed to fly dangerously off the roof and around the neighborhood.
Flying shards: Story about dangerous construction debris here.
Citizens Defending Libraries outside: Municipal Art Society's Summit on "Public Assets": Who Gets to Decide What They Are & Whether They Matter, Featuring Goldman Sachs and A Library-Shrinking Developer David Kramer
Meanwhile, and this again pertains importantly to what is happening on the national scene, we are focusing more on the subject of surveillance in our New York City libraries, why spy-firm Booz Allen Hamilton was hired in connection with the shrinking sale of our libraries, the elimination of books and the introduction of  more electronics into our reading.  That's something I have testified about this December season before City Council as co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries with Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer saying that he is quite familiar with the PATRIOT Act, understands the concern we raised, but disagrees with us.
 As mentioned by Van Bramer, if he agreed with us, the concerns we raise would, among other things, affect "hundreds of thousands, if not millions of undocumented folks."  Yes, with national changes there is a lot of thought being given to things like this and related issues, like whether "sanctuary cities" are viable protections.

One thing to realize is that what is going on nationally that now seams so threatening is all related to the kinds of things we have been fighting locally.  In that regard it is ironic that the president-elect that has so many of us legitimately concerned is nominally a New York real estate developer.   . . (BTW: One good turn of events to note this year is that Bruce Ratner has been kicked off the board of his own company, even if his spirit lives on.)

. . .  The other thing to realize about national events is how little we may actually know or understand what really happened, or, in that regard, that we are probably not a nation as "divided" as some some people are telling us right now.

Here are links to the prior Noticing New York ventures into seasonal reflection where you can read (and find some pleasurable visuals- including the de Blasio Grincy-morph-face) about Mayor de Balsio as a Grinch, Bruce Ratner as the grasping Henry Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life" or similar fun comparisons respecting Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol":
•    Thursday, December 24, 2009, A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville),

•    Friday, December 24, 2010, Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville,

•    Saturday, December 24, 2011, Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville,

•    Monday, December 24, 2012, While I Tell of Yuletide Treasure,

•    Tuesday, December 24, 2013, A Seasonal Reflection: Assessing Aspirations Toward Alternate Realities- 'Tis A Tale of Two Alternate Cities?.,

Wednesday, December 24, 2014, Seasonal Reflections: No Matter How Fortunate or Not, We Are All Equal, Sharing a Common Journey

•    Thursday, December 24, 2015, Seasonal Reflection: Mayor de Blasio, His Heart Squeezed Grinch-Small, Starts Gifting Stolen Libraries To Developers For The Holidays

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Donald Trump (Whose Son-In-Law Was In on Donnell Library Sale) Puts Library-Selling Stephen Schwarzman In Charge of Economic Policy

It’s like those Frankenstein meets the Wolfman horror movie mash ups that came out of the Universal Studios in the days of yore: Donald Trump, the self-styled `real estate mogul’ whose son-in-law was a principal financial beneficiary of the sudden and secretive sale of the Donnell Library for a pittance meets up with library-destroying Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of Blackstone, the world’s largest real estate investment firm (among other things), the NYPL trustee who helped push the Donnell real estate deal out the door to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and was even rumored to be personally involved in the deal through his own companies beforehand.

CNBC has reported that president-elect Trump has announced who he will be meeting with frequently as president.   Blackstone CEO Schwarzman (of all people) is to chair a strategic and policy forum for Trump that will be comprised of “heads of some of the largest financial, industrial and media companies in the United States,” selected by Schwarzman.  See: MSNBC- Trump to meet 'frequently' with Blackstone's Schwarzman, other business titans to discuss policy, by Jacob Pramuk, Friday, 2 Dec 2016.
  
One can understand why appointing Schwarzman to such a position and meeting with him frequently would seem juicy in terms of opportunity to Trump given that, as just mentioned,  Schwarzman is the head of the world’s largest real estate investment company.  Think how resplendent and limitless that makes the business possibilities, although that’s not why Trump is supposed to be meeting with people as president.

The fact that Schwarzamn is involved in all or nearly all of the following seven lines of business should have significant attractions to Trump from a business point of view:
    •    private equity
    •    hedge fund
    •    real estate
    •    a large credit business that does highly leveraged credit,
    •    a mergers and acquisition group
    •    a troubled company restructuring business
    •    Raising money for other people in the alternative asset classes from institutional investors
When has the situation even been so ripe for turning a position in government into a money-making profit center?
There is a theory everyone is talking about concerning how we are not supposed to be “normalizing” all of the Trump excesses and the current far-ranging departures from precedent and what was previously viewed as good behavior and proper lawful comportment.  So you have to wonder when the New York Times, looking ahead to the Trump administration, writes an article finding possible precedent for what they foresee in the mega-conflict-of-interest scandals of the eight years that businessman Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister of Italy. . . And, it’s not just business; in the case of each man there have been legal proceedings to deal with charges of their illegally having sex with underage women.  (See: Trump's Potential Conflicts Have a Precedent: Berlusconi's Italy, by James B. Stewart, December 1, 2016.)

In what is possibly a somewhat “normalizing” comparison, the Times article says that Mr. Berlusconi's conflicts were “more blatant than Mr. Trump's potential conflicts, because he owned so much of the Italian media,” while neglecting to point out that there has already been talk about Trump starting his own television network.  Are we sure that’s no longer being thought about, because it’s certainly something that Trump’s campaign advisor, Roger Ailes, exiled from Fox News for sexual harassment, and Trump’s chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, out of Breitbart News, would probably both love.  (Ailes and Trump were both in the news simultaneously for respective reports of sexual harassment, even as they worked together on the campaign.)

Unfortunately, a great deal of the “precedent” the Times challenged itself to go abroad to find in Italy with Mr. Berlusconi had already had groundbreaking precedent laid for Mr. Trump by Michael Bloomberg as mayor in New York City.  Some years ago Noticing New York wrote about the similarities between Bloomberg and Berlusconi, including the fact that they had neighboring homes in Bermuda.  Both Bloomberg and Berlusconi significantly repositioned where they stood on the charts of financial recognition while they held political office, racking up significant extra billions to inflate their wealth.  Bloomberg, like Berlusconi also had some media muscle to flex, including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Radio on a local radio station he acquired, and Bloomberg cable television (even as the New York City was regulating cable companies).

The Donnell and other library-shrinking sell-offs were initiated in New York City under Bloomberg as mayor (although de Blasio, breaching the promises of his campaign, has continued pursuing them.)

During the campaign, several variations of a gimmick used by Trump emerged.  It cropped up with Trump’s side-stepping of federal income tax payments and his quid-pro-quo payments of elected officials (“When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do”): He asserted that because he had participated so heavily and successfully in a “rigged system” he was the one who knew best and was the best choice to “fix it,” including telling potential voters that  "Our campaign is about breaking up the special interest monopoly.”

There is actually some precedent in the way we recount history that might make such promises sound less absurd: When Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy as the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 there were gasps about the fox guarding the henhouse, as Kennedy was known for sharp deals taking advantage of insider trading and market manipulation.  Kennedy knew all the fraudulent, questionable backroom ways of stuffing the pockets of finance’s fattest fat cats.”  Nevertheless, it is generally credited that Kennedy, because he knew so well how the system could be abused, knew how best to root out its problems and reform it and actually did exactly that.

There is hardly any reason to now believe that is where we are headed with Trump. Where is Trump headed? . .

. .   Because Trump, routinely self-contradictory and perpetually caught in lies, can’t be depended on to actually tell us where he is headed, we are supposed to now cultivate a talent for listening through his “cacophony of lies. . [and] nonsense” to hear what he is actually, bigger picture, saying, which according to Masha Gessen, among other things involves the message that he is powerful enough to lie without consequence, something our previous politicians pushing the envelope of false political promise have never before been so immoderate about.

Firmer ground to fall back to is the “pay attention to what I do, not what I say” rule, but that inevitably leaves one playing catch-up.

While it may be that rooting problems out of the system could involve at least a certain amount of stealth (to avoid being too obvious about too soon?), it doesn’t look from any of Trump’s appointments that he is surrounding himself with any allies who would assist in pursuing any kind of reform.

Trump may once have spoken about “draining the swamp” when he was elected while excoriating Goldman Sachs (and Hillary’s Goldman $peechs), but now people perceive that he’s actually `filling the swamp with alligators,’ including multiple Goldman appointments, even to the extent that it might even start causing succession problems back at Goldman.

Trump biographer Pulitzer Prize-wining David Cay Johnston is something of a self-proclaimed expert on Trump, having reported about Trump since the early 1980s.  If you believe Johnston, Trump’s specialty is ensuring he makes a personal profit no matter what does (even making money just campaigning for president) and very typically leaving other people worse off, short-changed as he exits, for instance through bankruptcy.  According to Johnston (better audio if you go to WBAI):
what Donald is a master at is finding a way to extract money from something, make a deal, get an enterprise, pull all the money he can out of it.  This is not a man who creates wealth.  This is not a man with a long-term viewpoint.  He is simply someone who, like a leach, sucks the lifeblood out of a business for himself, and then moves on.
With a huge dossier of back-up files, Johnston says that Donald “has for his entire life embraced con artists, swindlers, violent felons” with the very troublesome involvement of organized crime figures to boot.   David Cay Johnston has been writing for a while about increasing wealth inequality with books like “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)” (2008) and says that government policy now (and this was before it was known that Trump was headed to the White House) is to take from the many to further enrich the few.”

Ergo, with what the corporations have been doing to us, extracting from the many to further enrich the few, it is perfect that Trump is teaming up with Stephen Schwarzman to chair a group of business leaders to set national policy that can proliferate such approaches throughout the economy.  That is Stephen Schwarzman, who, with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner participating, extracted value from the many for the few with the sale of the Donnell Library.  It is already worried by those looking ahead at these things that when it comes to all the publicly-owned assets of the nation’s infrastructure Trump’s plans will be a full-on privatization assault,” a “privatization fire sale” ensuring “that private, not common, interests determine where funding is focused.”

The whole situation is rife with possibilities for crony capitalism: Before even assuming office Trump and Vice-President Elect Mike Pence just gave tons of tax-payer money and exemptions from regulatory protections for the public to Carrier, a company that is moving 1,300 jobs from Indiana to Mexico (while, supposedly in return for that government `generosity' keeping just 800 jobs here- another 300 jobs weren't ever possibly going to be moved), while, at the same time, other companies all around Carrier are also moving jobs to Mexico.

No, the signs are terrible.  The fossil fuel extraction industry that profits when it destroys the environment that the rest of us depend on to live will have a climate change denier presiding at the head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.  And since climate change destroys the entire planet there is no place to move.

In fact, another reason we need to stay here in this country to fix things, deal with these devils we are getting to know here, is that similar things are happening around the world.

Just as the invaluable Donnell Library was plundered in a shrink-and-sink sale so that a luxury hotel and condominium tower could be built on its site (with Trump’s son-in-law a principal financial beneficiary), so too is the Sheffield Library in England threatened with sale so it can be turned into a luxury “five-star hotel.”   The luxury hotel at the site of the former Donnell was sold to Chinese investors for a record-setting amount (none of this money ever went NYC libraries).  The Sheffield Library is similarly proposed to be sold to Chinese investors.

One floor of the building now housing the Sheffield Library houses the Graves art gallery, an art museum opened by wealthy businessman man John George Graves in 1934 dedicated to ‘the service of knowledge and art.’  While the library would be moved away, the Graves art museum would remain in the building with the luxury hotel presumably enhancing the hotelier’s business prospects.  That sounds rather like what happened with Donnell which was, before it was banished, in a valuable location for a cultural library, across the street from the Museum of Modern Art.   Now it’s the patrons of the luxury Baccarat Hotel that benefit from such convenient access to the museum.
Coverage from the Guardian and the Sheffield Star

Sale of the Sheffield library is vehemently being opposed, by, among others, actor Michael Palin, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus fame, who “has described the proposals as an embarrassment for the city of his birth.”

In a letter to the Sheffield Star Palin wrote:
The Sheffield Central Library embodies the very best aspects of civic pride. It's a fine building, built to give education and literacy a prominent place at the very heart of the city.

That a building, seeking to improve the lot of all Sheffielders, should end up as a hotel for the rich and privileged, seems a sad reflection on how little the city cares for its public service legacy.
There is a quote from Palin on display on the first floor in the library:
There is no institution I value more in this country than libraries.
In its day, Monty Python with Mr. Palin contributing brilliantly, brought us far-fetched laughable conceptions such as the government’s “Ministry of Silly Walks.”  Unfortunately, we are succumbing to much more far-fetched tragedies.  It looks like under Trump we will, in essence, have a new department of the government, headed up by Mr. Schwarzman: “The Ministry of Silly Ideas To Sell off Valuable Public Properties.”

Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries and on the board of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

American Library Association Issues "Advocacy Alert" About “Massive Privacy Threat" of U.S. Government Remotely Hacking Library Computers and NYPL Issues “Privacy Policy”- Is “Privacy” At Libraries Actually Protected?

Tuesday, November 29th the American Library Association sent out an Advocacy Alert from about “a massive privacy threat,” the proposed and pending (“Rule 41”) grant to federal law enforcement authorities of “sweeping new powers to remotely hack into computers or computer systems,” including they advised everyone to worry possibly “your library's.”
November 29th American Library Association Advocacy Alert
about "a massive privacy threat” affecting libraries

New NYPL "Privacy Policy"

Early the next morning, Wednesday, Nov 30, 2016, the New York Public Library distributed to its list of library users and patrons its new updated privacy policy.

The NYPL’s new policy, about a year and a half in the making, and taking effect the day of its promulgation, was adopted by its board of trustees on November 16, 2016.  That was about two weeks after Noticing New York ran an article about how the private spy company Booz Allen Hamilton, regarded by experts as an "arm of the [United States] intelligence community,". . .  "with the "federal government as practically its sole client" was hired by the NYPL to overhaul its most important libraries in a scheme that entailed the sale and destruction of the Donnell, Mid-Mahattan and SIBL libraries and the central research stacks of the 42nd Street Central Research Library.  See: Sunday, October 30, 2016, Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?

That NYPL trustees meeting was the same day as the publication of another article in Noticing New York following up on the subject of Booz Allen Hamilton's connection with the NYP, and its plans.  See: Wednesday, November 16, 2016, Too Close For Comfort? Real Estate Addresses- Blackstone, Booz Allen Hamilton, The Libraries & Bryant Park.

Should NYPL library users be assured by the NYPL’s distribution the new privacy policy via an email that the new policy “protects our users, increasing trust and transparency between the Library and the community we serve,” albeit encouraging users to “read the full text” of the policy to understand it?  The policy itself opens with some reassuringly axiomatic words most would find easy to agree with:
 Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association.
The policy tells us that the NYPL “is committed to protecting your privacy, whether you are a user, visitor, and/or donor” and the policy even self-reflexively asserts that it was written drawing “upon industry best practices and national standards for privacy.”
NYPL November 16, 2016 Trustees meeting where new privacy policy was adopted

Bringing Up Privacy In Visit With NYPL Officials and Policy Makers About Future

As it happens, on the very day the NYPL was issuing its new privacy policy, a number of members of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library met with a group of senior NYPL policy and administration officials about their shaping of plans to keep increasingly fewer books at the library while relying on digital access and retrieval of books more or less by default.  I am a member of CSNYPL and was part of the meeting.  (I am also a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries.)

At the meeting, I managed to slightly embarrass myself by asking if I could get a copy of the new privacy policy as I overlooked my morning email telling me it was now online.  I was, however, up-to-date enough to ask our host NYPL officials where they were with respect to the American Library Association’s Advocacy Alert regarding “a massive privacy threat” to libraries computers from “Rule 41.”  As they were unaware of the issue I forwarded the ALA alert afterwards.  Also, not presuming, I’ve asked whether the NYPL is a member of the ALA.  The ALA has in the past taken a proactive stance agitating for the protection of library privacy, its council adopting, January 29, 2003, a Resolution on the USA Patriot Act and Related Measures That Infringe on the Rights of Library Users.

If you want to watch something even more prescient, in 2002, the Ad Council ran a 30 second public interest spot about library privacy and the preservation of American freedom.  The advertisement really ought still to be running today.  The advertisement asked the question “What if America wasn’t America?” darkly envisioning a dystopian future with government surveillance agents in the library and it ends instructively with the admonition: “Freedom- Appreciate It. Cherish It. Protect It.” (Citizens Defending Libraries included it as a commercial break as part of our October 2015 evening of library theater and comedy.)

At our meeting with the NYPL officials, I asked about the effect of their shift to digital approach on privacy specifically including the effect of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) which I noted was something the NYPL board had discussed.  There was no recognition of what the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was or its effect and it was suggested this could be discussed separately afterward with one of the administrators there at the table responsible.  That official has now given me the name of another NYPL official, the Director of Privacy and Compliance, to follow up with.

Expansion of CALEA And Library Privacy Fights Preceding NYPL's Engagement of Booz Allen Hamilton

When I wrote about the NYPL’s 2007 engagement of the private United States spy firm Booz Allen Hamilton for its reorganizational shedding of its books and physical library resources like the real estate that houses the books I observed the coincidence that the hiring of Booz came not long after it was revealed (May of 2006) that librarians had been fighting the federal government's overreach of secretly taking PATRIOT Act surveillance into the libraries.

The Connecticut librarians involved in that fight were subject to a perpetual gag order by the U.S. government so that it took years before what was going on was finally revealed to the public, and it was finally revealed to the public that May (and thus to others in the library world) only because the Connecticut librarians had finally won their fight.  Might one assume that the revelations must have been big news in the library world at the time with major implications respecting the future of privacy in libraries and the fight to preserve it?

It occurred to me to review NYPL minutes to see what had been observed about this revelation and discussed by the board about preserving library privacy at that time.  Somewhat surprisingly, I found nothing in the NYPL minutes of that time that mentioned the Connecticut librarians fight for privacy or victory.  I did find something else contemporaneous and related, something ominous with respect to preservation of library privacy, and it can be found in minutes just before the revelations respecting the Connecticut librarians secretly fought fight.
February 8, 2008 NYPL minutes: CALEA) may “require” the NYPL “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement’s ability to monitor and intercept communications”

The minutes of the February 8, 2008 NYPL trustees meeting reveal that new rules under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) may “require” the NYPL and other educational institutions “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement’s ability to monitor and intercept communications including e-mail and Voice Over Internet Protocol.” 

The minutes note that “groups, including the American Library Association” (the minutes do not say including the NYPL) were seeking a clarification that the new rules would “not apply to certain libraries,” and challenging the extension of CALEA “to services other than communications.”  February 8, 2006 is the same meeting where NYPL financial officer David Offensend advises the trustees of a Bloomberg administration initiative to strip down the capital funds the NYPL had on hand.  A need to augment NYPL capital funds would not long thereafter be cited as a rationale for plans Offensend would implement to sell off the Donnell Library, and the NYPL Central Library Plan involving a consolidating shrinkage, disposing of the central destination Mid-Manhattan Library, the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library and the destruction of the research book stacks at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.
May 3, 2006 Minutes: CALEA (requirement to reengineer the NYPL’s Internet  for enhanced law enforcement monitoring & interception of communication) plus Google digitizing books, eBooks, relocation of the Library’s data center and webcasting.
May 3, 2006 the trustees again discussed, with no further amplification noted in the minutes, the proposed CALEA requirement to reengineer the NYPL’s Internet service facilities for enhanced law enforcement monitoring and interception of communication and also discussed other technological issues: the Google project to digitize its books, eBooks, relocation of the Library’s data center and webcasting of programs.

Although the news would have been out by then, the June 7, 2006 NYPL Executive Committee minutes do not mention revelation of the Connecticut librarians privacy battle.  Neither do the minutes of the first meeting of the full NYPL board after that held on September 9, 2006.
September 9, 2009 minutes: "Guidance" on CALEA monitoring and interception of communication via the NYPL's Internet provider, not the library itself
The minutes of the September 9, 2009 trustees meeting do, however, return to a related subject, the privacy encroachment on library privacy via the expanded CALEA rules.  The co-chair of the board’s Committee on technology advised the NYPL trustees that “the library has now received guidance that its Internet Service Provider, and not the Library itself, will be required to comply with” the recently expanded CALEA rules for federal law enforcement monitoring and communication interception. . .

. . . And apparently there was increasingly more to monitor: Discussing information concerning user patterns and the library's website and its redesign it was noted that the NYPL website had “received over 20 million electronic visits during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, as compared to about 14 million in person visits to the Library’s physical facilities.”  (Even if you are going physically to a library to get a physical book there are increasingly reasons to check online ahead of time about whether you are likely to find the book there, whether the library will be open, etc.)

What was not noted in those September minutes is that the “guidance” given to the trustees about how the recently expanded CALEA rules for federal law enforcement monitoring and communication interception were going to be complied with almost certainly flowed from and was shaped taking into account a June 9, 2006 loss respecting the fight for library privacy.  On that date, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided against a group of higher education and library organizations led by the American Council on Education that had challenged the monitoring and interceptions as unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment prohibitions on unreasonable search and seizures.  (See: Washington Post- Appeals Court Sides With White House on Wiretaps, by Kim Hart, June 10, 2006.) As the case itself was not as a matter of record mentioned to the trustees one might suspect that the NYPL was not one of the litigant challengers, something I haven’t been able to determine yet.

The ruling in the case, American Council on Education v. Federal Communications Commission, United States of America, Verizon Telephone Companies et al. speaks in language paralleling the guidance to the trustees.  It considered the argument that institutions like libraries were exempt from CALEA (the “information-services exclusion”) “insofar as they are engaged in providing information services.”   But the court upheld the FCC interpretation that providing “information services” did not constitute an outright exclusion to the extent that, hybrid fashion, communication services were also being provided, if they were being provided outside of an entirely private network.  The hookups to communicate with the public outside of the private network are what allow the expanded CALEA monitoring and interception under the FCC’s rule.  As the court expressed it to the extent “these private networks are interconnected with a public network, either the [public voice network] or the Internet, providers of the facilities that support the connection of the private network to a public network are subject to CALEA.”

The Shell of NYPL Privacy Policy Protections- "Legal Requests"

The new NYPL privacy policy advises, under a section titled Legal Requests,” that “sometimes the law requires” the NYPL to share patron information “such as if we receive a valid subpoena, warrant, or court order” and that the NYPL may share information “if our careful review leads us to believe that the law, including state privacy law applicable to Library Records, requires us to do so.”  The section doesn’t warn library users that the modern day version of wiretapping, the reengineering of “Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement’s ability to monitor and intercept communications” under CALEA’s expanded rules would happen through compliance by the NYPL’s “Internet Service Provider, and not the Library itself.”

The NYPL policy doesn’t suggest that if, in the very likely event subpoenas go to the NYPL’s “Internet Service Provider” instead of the NYPL, the NYPL is then itself quite unlikely to see any such subpoenas or `carefully review’ them at all.  Nor, does the policy suggest how often information is obtained these days without interested parties ever seeing subpoenas, warrants, or court orders.   Probably what “careful review” tells anyone these days about what “the law” can require is that, no matter what you have formally received from the government, little should be assumed about the privacy of any exchanges on the Internet.

There is one section of the NYPL’s privacy policy that warns that the NYPL uses “third-party library service providers and technologies to help deliver some of our services” and may share information with them for which the NYPL doesn’t assure privacy, but this doesn’t seem to be a warning about the NYPL’s internet provider(s) or CALEA monitoring or interceptions.

It reads:
      2. Third-Party Library Services Providers.  We use third-party library service providers and technologies to help deliver some of our services to you.  If and when you choose to use such services, we may share your information with these third parties, but only as necessary for them to provide services to NYPL.  We may also display links to third-party services or content. By following links, you may be providing information (including, but not limited to Personal Information) directly to a third party, to us, or to both. You acknowledge and agree that NYPL is not responsible for how those third parties collect or use your information.  Third parties must either agree to adhere to strict confidentiality obligations in a way that is consistent with this Privacy Policy and the agreements we enter into with them or we require them to post their own privacy policy.  We encourage you to review the privacy policies of every third-party website or service that you visit or use, including those third parties with whom you interact with through our Library services.
Perhaps, as you read this, you feel like you’d need a lawyer to understand whether your privacy as a NYPL users is in any way assured.  I happen to be a lawyer myself and find the laws that have expanded surveillance in our country since 9/11 far from readily understandable except to know that those laws are not very limiting to the government and that, even to the extent that they have been, it does not appear they have always been complied with.

A Federal Judiciary Grapples With Protecting Privacy

It is therefore interesting that at the NYPL’s last trustee meeting, the November 16th meeting where the board approved the new privacy policy, one of the two new trustees the NYPL appointed to its board that day was Judge Robert A. Katzmann (the other was Tony Yoseloff).  Judge Katzmann is Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Although Judge Katzmann was not one of the three judges deciding the case, it was in his Second Circuit Court of Appeals that it was ruled, May 7, 2015, in American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper, that the bulk data collection of Americans' phone records by the National Security Agency was illegal.  See New York Times: N.S.A. Collection of Bulk Call Data Is Ruled Illegal, by Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman, May 7, 2015.  (As Chief Judge, you can see Judge Katzmann’s name alongside the clerk of the court’s on the “Bill of Costs Instructions” pages of the decision.)

The May 2015 Clapper decision was decided by Second Circuit Court of Appeals partly in the more informed light and public awareness following the 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures about the extent of massive domestic surveillance exceeding what had been represented to the public to actually be happening.

In finding that the surveillance was unpermitted the court said that Congress had never intended to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, that it was a “a far stretch” to assert “that Congress was aware of” the “legal interpretation” being used for the dragnet collection of personal data,  that the statutes which the government suggested provided equivalent precedents had “never been interpreted to authorize anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here.”   The court said that the massive collections of data were untethered from the pursuit of actual investigations and that the “expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans.”

What happened with respect to the May 7, 2015 Clapper decision afterward is somewhat complex: Congress, which the court thought had not actually authorized the program and its practices, acted to replace it with another program that, putting the responsibility for data collection initially in private party hands, theoretically has more protections for the public, but on August 28, 2015 the May decision was overturned by the Court of Appeals, the practical effect of that Court of Appeals decision being more limited by virtue of the congressional change.

One line of reasoning offered to allow persistence of the various sweeping data surveillance and collection programs by the federal government is the promise that the federal government won’t look at the data collected unless or until it develops an investigative interest in knowing more about targeted individuals it identifies to whom that data relates.

Protecting Freedom of Thought: How Things Can Change, Including Politically
Snowden appearing in "Vice" episode
The United State President currently in office, Obama, is low key, mild mannered, thoughtfully measured and, if you put out of your mind such things as his drone attacks, he gives the impression of generous good will towards most human beings.  No doubt many have not been frightened to think of surveillance tools as being under his control and direction even if they are virtually unlimited in their power.  Notwithstanding, months ago Edward Snowden, being interviewed on an episode of “Vice explicated his warning about “turn-key tyranny”:
Even if you trust the government today, what happens when it changes?  In our democracy we’re never more than eight years away from a total change of government.  Suddenly, everyone’s vulnerable to this individual and the systems are already in place.  What happens tomorrow, in a year, in five years, in ten years, when eventually we get an individual who says, “You know what? Let’s flip that switch and use the absolute full extent of our technological capabilities to ensure the political stability of this new administration”?
. .  He was speaking in the abstract at the time, not about Trump.

Political cultures and environments can change rapidly, sometimes with calculating help from those who have ascended to power.  The Nazi era in Germany and the countries Germany occupied provide examples of how completely countries can change faster than residents could recognize the dire threat they faced in time to flee and save their lives.

Our own country has had its own very recent periods where, with intense monitoring, we have sought to tightly constrain, criminalize and penalize unpermitted political thinking.
New plaque outside my Brooklyn Heights building.  We revere Arthur Miller as a great mind and writer, but also because he refused to "name names" when, only recently in this country, that was an act of incredible courage.  You can watch the video of the plaque dedication ceremony to learn more about Miller's courage with comment about how that relates to today.

Outside the building where I live in Brooklyn Heights we just put up a plaque commemorating the fact that Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915 - February 10, 2005), the celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who authored “The Crucible,” “Death of A Salesman,” “A View From the Bridge” and many other great works once lived in the building.  The plaque reads in part:
In 1956, Miller refused to name names when he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American activities Committee.
Throughout the decades that Jane Jacobs was known to the world as a celebrated urbanist thinker she assiduously avoided being pigeon-holed has a Republican, Democrat, Liberal or Conservative.  I am now reading Robert Kanigel’s new biographer of her life, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,” and have been surprised to learn that in 1952 (the year I was born) Jacobs, threatened with the loss of her government job, was forced to defend herself against suspicions that her independence of thought made her immoral and disloyal to the United States.  That was despite that fact she had a proven record of writing some very effective “propaganda” on the Unite States Government’s behalf.

Jacobs’ eight-thousand-word defense in response to the accusations of suspicion included:
It still shocks me, although we should all be used to it by this time, to realize that Americans can be officially questioned on their union membership, political beliefs, reading matter and the like.  I do not like this, and I like still less the fear that arises from it. . .

I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment.  I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and freedom for chewing over odd ideas.
She had much more to say, of course, including about her abhorrence of the “political tyranny” of the Soviet system of government taking on as its mission “the molding of people into a ‘specific kid os man,’ i.e. ‘Soviet Man,’” that it practiced and extolled “a conception of the state as ‘control from above and support from below’; that controls the work of artists, musicians, architects and scientists; that controls what people read and attempts to control what people think.”  Notice her stress on the relationship between freedom to read and freedom of thought.


Federal Judiciary In Residence at the NYPL Amongst The Trustees

Was any particular purpose intended to be served by the NYPL’s appointment of Judge Robert A. Katzmann as a new trustee?  When it comes to certain of the NYPL’s goals, does this unfold resources for the NYPL to navigate better through the overlapping welter of broad surveillance laws virtually none of us can fully comprehend and quite frequently can’t find out much about?  Does it put the NYPL in a better position to try to protect the privacy of patrons using the library? Conversely, does it create conflicts of interests for the judge if he now hears related surveillance cases?

Interestingly, as previously noted here in Noticing New York, on September 19, 2007, the NYPL trustees were previously advised, that another federal judge in the Southern Circuit who was similarly an NYPL trustee at that time, Judge Victor Marrero, handed down "an important opinion on the USA PATRIOT Act" (September 7th) ordering the FBI to stop its wide use of warrantless, secret "national security letters" (NSLs) to demand e-mail and telephone data from private companies, saying in his opinion:
The risk of investing the FBI with unchecked discretion to restrict such speech is that government agents, based on their own self-certification, may limit speech that does not pose a significant threat to national security or other compelling government interest
“Rule 41”: Another Library Privacy Battle Lost Last Friday, December 1st 


Coverage in The Hill of the more recent proposed “Rule 41” change about which the American Library Association sent out its Advocacy Alert last week explained, “The Department of Justice’s alterations to the rule would allow law enforcement to use a single warrant to hack multiple devices beyond the jurisdiction that the warrant was issued in.”   Opposition to the change was expressed in a letter signed by a long list of organizations (23 in all) that included American Civil Liberties Union, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and two library organizations additional to the American Library Association, American Association of Law Libraries and Association of Research Libraries.  The letter stated the rule change could be “abused to obtain a single warrant to search millions of targets, raising a host of constitutional concerns” and “would permit law enforcement to search the computers of hundreds of entirely innocent crime victims without their consent.”

The letter which also described the “unique harms” of hacking that could also flow out to third parties stated the “consequences of this rule change are far from clear, and could be deleterious to security as well as to Fourth Amendment privacy rights. Government hacking, like wiretapping, can be much more privacy invasive than traditional searches. . .  because judges often authorize these warrants without requiring the government to specify the tactics and techniques that will be used, we simply do not know the full extent of the government’s searches.”  A statement from Robyn Greene, who handles policy counsel and government affairs at New America’s Open Technology Institute, said “This rule change is far too complex and raises too many privacy and cybersecurity concerns for Congress to let the rule go into effect without conducting any oversight whatsoever.”

Unfortunately for us and apparently for our libraries, despite the ALA Advocacy Alert, “Rule 41” took effect December 1st.  Edward Snowden weighed in about it on Twitter: Without a debate or any new law, the rights of every American -- and basic privacy of people around the world -- have been narrowed.  And also: The DOJ's claims are dishonest: #Rule41 substantively changes the limits on the government's powers. The FBI's hacking was just legalized.”

Snowden's "Rule 41" Tweets

Its Policy Notwithstanding, Is Privacy At NYPL's Digital Libraries Assured?

So last week the NYPL sent out to its users the reassuring email that it has a “privacy policy,” and that, with its revisions, the policy along with its `protection’ of library users will increase “trust and transparency between the Library and the community we serve,” telling users that if they read the policy, they will “understand what data we collect and how we use it.”  But is it fair to say that by reading the policy library users will understand what sort of data will be collected when they visit the library electronically or make use of its many increasing electronic features and portholes to access its resources and books?

Is it fair to think there will be privacy in our libraries if efforts to oppose the curtailment of library privacy by rule expansions like the CALEA expansion or “Rule 41” change keep getting defeated?  Is it fair to think that the NYPL's privacy policy assures any privacy if it's actually the NYPL’s “Internet Service Provider, and not the Library itself” that complies with CALEA’s data collection . .  therefore operating outside the circumscribed shell of the NYPL’s privacy policy?

Let's expand these questions to ask big picture: Should we be assured that we will find privacy at the library when the NYPL hired Booz Allen Hamilton, the biggest private spy firm in the nation working for the U.S. Government, as its consultant to structure its reorganizational shedding of its books and physical library resources like the real estate that housing them?  Let’s remember again that the NYPL hired Booz Allen not very long after its board was advised of the expectation that CALEA might “require” the NYPL and “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement’s ability to monitor and intercept communications.”

Certainly, Booz Allen, the firm where Edward Snowden once worked, would have possessed extremely relevant and tailored expertise in navigating responses through changing surveillance laws and the practices that implement them, but is it to be legitimately hoped that Booz would use that expertise to enhance and secure library privacy, or ought we instead entertain suspicions about the reverse?

Suffice it to say, that if you visited NYPL libraries like Mid-Manhattan, SIBL, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library or the now destroyed Donnell Library to access books that were then readily available to you on premises (and did not need to be electronically accessed) you were afforded a real and practical assurance of privacy that does not now apply with the various means of accessing books digitally, including connecting through the Internet that you must use now in the wake of changes made with Booz's consulting guidance.

Sacrifice of the Traditional Library on the Altar of Digital Nirvana

At our meeting last week with NYPL library officials we expressed concern about how NYPL library book shelves now sit, apparently unnecessarily, devoid of books.  Through most of the meeting, we heard a lot from the NYPL officials about the glorious benefits of digitizing the availability of books.  Similarly, we were told about what goes along with this, the benefits centralizing the availability of books with the elimination of  “duplicates” of these printed repositories of knowledge- except that it had to be conceded that such cost-reducing cutbacks for libraries also defund publishers and authors.

We were told, however, that the glories of digitization demand sacrifice.   Bill Kelly (William P. Kelly), the NYPL’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries, told us:
I think it will come as no news to anyone at this table that expenses in the world of libraries as we try to do both print and digital forms become increasingly more expensive.  I would argue that they are not sustainable across time.  This is not an unusual position.  This is one shared across the library terrain.  I’ve talked with Carla Hayden [head of the Library of Congress] about it, I’ve talked with librarians at Cambridge and Oxford, I’ve talked with people in Chicago and California . . . The notion that one library can do all things is no longer a sustainable one . . The task of being able to maintain digital and print material at the same time- That horse left the barn a long time ago.
In other words, if we accept this, those of us who thought that digital tools might make things more affordable so that more becomes possible, and society’s wealth can increase, were wrong:  Digital technology makes libraries as we have known them unsustainable.

I could not listen to Mr. Kelly without remembering that there is a history of previous civilizations collapsing when those now dead-and-buried civilizations decided that their libraries were unsustainable and not worth keeping.  Of course, back then, the libraries that were being abandoned by these declining civilizations were libraries as we have traditionally known them and as they served us over the centuries, not the kind of hi-tech digital operations we are developing now than can do double duty to surveil us as we read.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Too Close For Comfort? Real Estate Addresses- Blackstone, Booz Allen Hamilton, The Libraries & Bryant Park

Here is a quick note, something to take stock of.  I invite readers to see what they can make of it.

At the end of last month I posted an article about how the private spy company Booz Allen Hamilton, regarded by experts as an “arm of the [United States] intelligence community,” with the “federal government as practically its sole client” was hired by the NYPL to overhaul its most important libraries in a scheme that entailed the sale and destruction of the Donnell, Mid-Mahattan and SIBL libraries and the central research stacks of the 42nd Street Central Research Library.

You should know, as background, that the U.S. contracts out the huge preponderance of its surveillance to private firms, and mainly to just a few firms with  Booz Allen Hamilton regarded as the colossus of those few.

In my article, (Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?- Sunday, October 30, 2016) I asked why a spy firm was hired in 2007 for a destructive reorganization of New York’s libraries when, only months before, in May of 2006, it was revealed that librarians had been fighting the federal government’s overreach of secretly taking PATRIOT Act surveillance into the libraries.  Subject to a perpetual gag order, it took years before what was going on was finally revealed to the public, and it was revealed only because the Connecticut librarians involved had finally won their fight.

In turning Noticing New York’s attention to the involvement of Booz and its motives in the dismantling of libraries I turned away, momentarily, away from Noticing New York’s previous major focus on the New York real estate industry’s push to plunder the libraries.

Perhaps I needn’t have: Here is an interesting connection that has surfaced linking the two.

A Noticing New York reader sent me information querying whether something the reader had found out wasn’t too close for comfort: That the spy firm Booz Allen Hamilton, like the NYPL’s prized 42nd Street Central Reference Library, is also located on Bryant Park.  It’s just across from the library.  As the park is not very big, that makes things very close.  Actually, the library itself is technically in Bryant Park, actually on and still part of that city-owned park land.  Something else many people don’t know: Most of the significantly diminished collection of books that are still at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library are actually under the park, in the park’s center connected by passageway underground.

Receiving the information I was able to make still one more important observation. . .

Because I had been paying attention to another thing, the Bryant Park real estate activity of Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group as the NYPL pursued its destructive Central Library Plan real estate plan, I noticed something else when Booz Allen Hamilton’s address (1095 6th Ave #25B, New York, NY 10036, aka 3 Bryant Park- occupying 12,000 square feet) was identified to me.  Blackstone (among many other things the world’s largest real estate investment firm) was Booz Allen Hamilton’s landlord. . . And Stephen Schwarzman?: He’s an NYPL trustee who was pushing for the destructive Central Library Plan.  (He is also the highest salaried man in America.)

For those who don’t know, Stephen Schwarzman’s name was put on the 42nd Street Central Reference Library (multiple times, five in all) in connection with the Central Library plan that removed its books and would have destroyed its research stacks.

Frankly, once I understood the importance of Booz in connection with the library dismantling, I  had already started researching for connections between Booz and other prime players in the library sell-offs, just as I had been looking out for connections between Blackstone and other principal players, like the connection between Blackstone and the NYC Comptroller’s office (we might hope that Scott Stringer has entirely terminated it) and Blackstone’s relationship with Senator Schumer, whose wife, Iris Weinshall, is now at the NYPL in charge of the NYPL’s continuing library real estate deals.

The potential possible connections between Booz and Blackstone were myriad, but not necessarily easy to find out about or discern if they were there.  Frankly, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I should do some simple address checking.  Now that the landlord/tenant real estate connection is identified, what does it mean?  It could actually mean a lot of things.  It could also, if you want to ascribe it simply to coincidence, mean nothing really.

As it turns out the Bryant Park address, 1095 6th Ave #25B, New York, NY 10036, aka 3 Bryant Park, is being left behind by both Blackstone and Booz.. .

 . . . Blackstone sold the building, inking its deal in November 2014 (the Central Library Plan got substantially disrupted May 2014, partly through lawsuits in which Citizens Defending Libraries, of which I am a co-founder, was a plaintiff).

Booz is leaving the building (announced March 2016) to move across the street into 133 Avenue of the Americas (taking 23,000 square feet on the 28th floor, nearly doubling its presence), a Durst building, the Bank of America Tower, which is only a few feet shorter than the Empire State Building.  Technically the 1,200 foot tower is the fourth tallest building in New York City.  The building is another on the border of the park, looming over it.  It would be the third tallest building in the city except that another building crept in ahead to rank between it and the World Trade Center Tower: We have now built an ultra-tall 1,398 ft residential tower, 432 Park Avenue, one of the new unprecedentedly tall buildings claiming the skyline to cast long shadows on Central Park.

(The Durst tower is, however, about to be suffer another significant demotion that will make it seem to shrink by comparison.  Just down the block, going up next to Grand Central Terminal is the new One Vanderbilt tower, 1,501-foot-tall, being built where it will also tower over Bryant Park.)

It is impossible to say exactly what these coincidences may mean.  I present them here so that those who can do further research, or present information or insight they may already have, can do so. . . .

Does it concern you that the country’s largest private intelligence firm involved with a dismantling overhaul of NYC libraries sits so cheek by jowl close to the preeminent research library thus subject to its dictates, and, similarly, so close to Mid-Manhattan, Manhattan’s largest circulating library? . . .

 . . .  If it does then you are also likely to be creeped out by the fact that millions of books shipped out of the 42nd Street library implementing the plan Booz was hired for went to a site in New Jersey immediately adjacent to the Forrestal Campus, a complex which has stringent federal security requirements as a laboratory devoted to nuclear fusion and plasma physics research.-  Maybe the world of deep federal security has just become too omnipresent overall.

. . . . Whether coincidence or not, does it creep you out that the nation’s largest private spy corporation hired by the NYPL for a dismantling overhaul of our city libraries was simultaneously the tenant of Blackstone, the world’s largest real estate investment corporation (plus many other things) the head of which, Stephen Schwarzman, was on the board of the NYPL pushing for that same dismantling overhaul?

. . .   And then, as we become increasingly beleaguered by dominating big towers and their implications, there are those who will just be creeped out automatically to know that a corporation like Booz, the nation’s biggest private spy corporation, will be located in the third tallest office tower in the city.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?

This post will in a moment, I assure you, be about what has been a favorite topic for Noticing New York to keep returning to in recent years: The dismantling of libraries as the institutions we have traditionally relied on, but first. . . .

Oliver Stone’s new film “Snowden” is now out playing in the theaters.  It is a powerful, important, brilliant and spectacularly well-crafted film.  You’re likely to want to see it more than once.  It is also, to an amazing degree about relationships, the kind that can make this world work better and the kind of relationships that drag us into dank swamps.  Although the film can’t pass the Bechdel–Wallace test (a test which must involve two women talking- and there is only one important woman in the film) it may pass muster as a woman’s film in that Snowden’s girlfriend plays such a key role.  An extraordinary amount of what unfolds hinges on the intelligent management of the developing bonds of the couple’s relationship.  To balance that out, the film is also about male bonding, at least to the same extent that one might say the "The Godfather" is about that subject.

The film is, of course, centrally about Snowden’s disclosure, through carefully vetted news reporters, of the massive, illegal, very worrying over-surveillance of the US citizens and basically everybody else in the world as well.  The film should be viewed in tandem with the excellent “Citizen Four” that won the Academy Award last year for best documentary.  That’s especially recommended in a situation where sticking to the facts is so critical.

Despite what some might tell you, the film is far from glib about what are the views of those who probably have positions opposite to Snowden’s and it absolutely does acknowledge that knowing what actual terrorists might be up to is a seriously essential matter.  It does acknowledge that the government's surveillance equipment could be used to protect Americans.  It is therefore more devastating in its indictment when it points out that the country’s over-surveillance of the public is less likely to be about hyper-vigilance to prevent terrorism and more likely to be about other things, things such as military-industrial-surveillance complex boondoggle spending.*  There is also the problem of the secret unleveling of playing fields and for the benefit of whomever that may be.
(* If you want to consider this further, follow the money. . .  And there is a huge amount of money to follow.  The amount of money that flows through our military-industrial-surveillance complex, with all that implies, is mind boggling-especially if you consider that, statistically speaking, it is 82 times more likely for someone to be killed falling out of bed than by a terrorist.  The amounts and portions of our budgets that flow to the spy agencies is not transparent, with a significant amount of such spending in a so-called "black budget" component involving little oversight or check against potential waste.  Frontline’s "Top Secret America" while referring to the secret expenditure figures tells us: "Exactly how much money the NSA was spending in the years after 9/11 is one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The agency's budget, like its work, is a state secret."  There are some sixteen or so different U.S. intelligence agencies.  The Guardian reported that, as of 2013, the government's "black budget" security agency spending had doubled over what was spent in 2001. But how precisely known these figures are has to be a guess as, for instance, the intricately related Pentagon's budget is very leaky and imprecise with trillions of dollars not properly accounted for on a recurring basis.  It is reported that the Pentagon controls 85% of the intelligence budget.  Budgets of other agencies, like the US Agency for International Development, are also leaky with amounts supposedly designated for other projects diverted to covert intelligence enterprises.  Then there have been the problems with off-budget spending with things like Iran-Contra arms sales or CIA drug trafficking generating unsupervised revenues.  In May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden in a secret CIA-led operation- about which there are disputed stories- The National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, "in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks."  Point of reference: a "trillion" is one million millions.  Notably, there was a significant increase in this torrential spending right after 9/11.  The National Priorities Project calculated that as of that May 2011, in adjusted for inflation terms, the Pentagon base budget- exclusive of the $1.4 trillion spend on the Iraq and Afghan wars- increased 43%, spending on nuclear weapons increased 21% and spending on "Homeland Security" went up 301%.  Prior to 9/11 there had been appreciable decreases in our military-industrial-surveillance complex spending with there being talk of still further reductions due to the expected "peace dividend" flowing from the demise of the Soviet Union.  Total expenditure figures continue to escalate at a fast rate since those 2011 calculations were done: For instance, the $365.9 billion figure the National Priorities Project gave for Homeland Security spending then it now states to have surpassed a total of $708 billion since 9/11 and the total cost of the wars we have waged since 9/11, exclusive of what is spent on the Pentagon base budget now exceeds $1.721 trillion, and just in the year of 2016 we have already spent about $1.1 billion on Predator and Reaper drones.  Put this in perspective of the entire national budget.  Offering its own calculation, the Friends Committee on National Legislation calculates that of the $2.674 trillion “federal fund” budget, which is the spending supported by income taxes, estate taxes, and other general revenues- not the trust funds self-supported by dedicated revenue like Social Security- 37.5% is going to pay for the cost of current and past wars.  It's not clear whether their 37.5% figure includes surveillance expenditures.  The surveillance expenditures also flow through the economy in interesting ways.  Snowden revelations disclosed that security spending included the NSA's making huge payments to internet companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook under the Prism program.  If properly calculated, these payments just reimbursed those companies for the cost of compliance with government surveillance requirements.  If not then. . .- Yahoo has recently been prominently in the news for the over-surveillance it did for the NSA.  Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were similarly in the news for such surveillance.  Thoughts on this? New York Magazine quips: "Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were shocked that law enforcement was using a company called Geofeedia to track their users. Only they're allowed to do that!"  As the main body of this piece will go on to make clear one thing that is key to remember about U.S. surveillance spending is that most of it is directed through what is officially the private sector.)
What has the Snowden movie got to do with the dismantling of our libraries as we know them?   It will become clear as we proceed, but first I can give you a hint: It is worthwhile to remember that it was librarians who offered the first successful challenge to the massive illegal over-surveillance of the public.  And now we proceed. . .

As the “Snowden” film nears its climax, the hitherto unknown Snowden is introduced on television screens around the world explaining that he is a employee of Booz Allen Hamilton a private firm contracted with the NSA.

Snowden’s revelations published beginning in June of 2013 acquainted many of us for the first time with the firm of Booz Allen Hamilton and what they do.  Within days we heard this on NPR’s “All Things Considered”:
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Back in the U.S., the leaks have put a spotlight on the company Edward Snowden worked for. Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the largest private contractors that does intelligence work for the government. Its share of the work keeps getting bigger, and as NPR's Laura Sullivan reports, that worries some government watchdogs.

LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: When you think of government cyber spying, it's easy to think of government employees of the CIA, FBI, NSA, the National Security Agency staring into computer screens, ferreting out foreign or domestic threats in nondescript office buildings. That's all actually true, except for the government employee part. These days, those employees are more likely than ever to work for government contractors.

    * * *

SULLIVAN: Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the largest government contractors in the country. It has 25,000 employees, nearly six billion in annual revenue and, for the most part, one customer: the federal government. Top officials familiar with the company told NPR that almost two-thirds of its work is now focused on intelligence- and defense-related contracts.

JAY STANLEY
[a senior policy analyst for the ACLU who focuses on technology and government.]: Booz Allen Hamilton is really an arm of the intelligence community.

They live on substantial government contracts. They have been involved with some of the most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years. They have actually lobbied for increased information sharing. And if you look at their leadership and their staff, they are heavily made up of former military and intelligence officers.

    * * * *

SULLIVAN: . . . . The company is considered one of the most trusted government contractors specializing in cybersecurity and technical support. Company records say 76 percent of employees have government security clearances.
(See: Booz Allen Hamilton A Major Player In Intelligence Community, by Laura Sullivan, June 10, 2013.)

A few days after this “All Things Considered” piece ran, Bloomberg Businessweek had a cover story proclaiming Booz Allen Hamilton the most profitable spy company:  Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization- How a consulting firm turned itself into the world's most profitable spy organization, by Drake Bennett and Michael Riley, June 21, 2013.  Essentially, although technically a private publicly traded company, Booz Allen is virtually indistinguishable from our government itself when it comes to surveillance, with as Bloomberg Businessweek said, the "federal government as practically its sole client."  The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz: "About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis."

The Bloomberg Businessweek article describes "a classic public-private revolving door" between those officially working directly for the government and those working for these private companies (at higher salaries):
Name a retired senior official from the NSA or the CIA or the various military intelligence branches, and there's a good chance he works for a contractor-most likely Booz Allen. Name a senior intelligence official serving in the government, and there's a good chance he used to work for Booz Allen.
More specifically, from the reporting at that time, here are some of those on the “roster of intelligence community heavyweights who work there” and vice versa:
    •    Mike McConnell- Booz Allen’s Vice Chairman, was (coming straight from the private sector) President George W. Bush's director of national intelligence and, before that, director of the NSA.

    •    James Clapper- President Obama's top intelligence adviser-is a former Booz Allen executive.  He is also the one who lied before Congress about the extent to which the government was actually collecting surveillance data on the American public.

    •    Joan Dempsey- A former CIA deputy director works for Booz Allen and has called it the "shadow IC" (for intelligence community).
In 2008 Booz Allen, as Bloomberg Businessweek phrases it, Booz: "became a pure government contractor, publicly traded and majority-owned by private equity firm Carlyle Group."

The Carlyle Group was shifting its significant military-industrial-surveillance complex, involving things like munitions used in Afghanistan, more into the ownership of surveillance organizations.  Carlyle bought a number of other intelligence companies, including, for instance, in 2003, Carlyle bought QinetiQ, a British company with Pentagon contracts that used to be the Defense Intelligence research unit of the British military (reputedly the inspiration for James Bond's Q), but which was privatized and perhaps sold way too cheaply in the early part of the George W. Bush administration.

The Carlyle Group has been nick-named "The Ex-Presidents' Club" and called "one of the world's largest and most secretive investment funds."

More specifically, from the reporting at that time, the Carlyle Group has close ties to the Bush family, including as investors.  Carlyle employees have included:
    •    George Herbert Walker Bush- Former U.S. President and also a former head of the CIA.

    •    George W. Bush- Former U.S. President during 9/11 and the launching of ensuing surveillance under the PATRIOT act and the one who led us into the Afghan and Iraq wars.

    •    Frank Carlucci- the firm's chairman, was Ronald Reagan's defense secretary and a former deputy director of the CIA.

    •    James Baker- Former U.S. Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury under G. H. W. Bush and White House Chief of Staff to Reagan and G. H. W. Bush.  Baker was also chief legal adviser for George W. Bush during the 2000 election overseeing the Florida recount battle which wound up with Supreme Court decision installing Bush as president. 
    •    John Major- Former British Prime Minister (succeeded by Tony Blair).
The list goes on.  Baker and Carlucci are among the partners investing in Carlyle. And, until 9/11 Bin laden Family members were also important investors in the Carlyle Group.

Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” raises a basic question, opining that it is "an extremely dangerous trend" to allow sensitive operations, "in some cases operations we shouldn't even be doing," such as prisoner interrogations (torture like at Abu Ghraib prison) and renditions, to "become profit centers" in the American system of capitalism.

Does all of this seem so terrible that you almost feel like somebody really ought to stop you from reading about it any further?

Now to the dismantling of libraries. . . 

. . .  Scott Sherman’s 2015 bookPatience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library revealed that in 2007 the New York Public Library hired Booz Allen Hamilton to advise and help oversee a "radical overhaul at the NYPL involving real estate sales, consolidation and fund-raising." Sherman says that "in consultation with with Booz Allen" the NYPL made the decision to sell three major libraries, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the Donnell Library and the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL).   In addition, the plan involved gutting the research stacks of the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library which held three million books, most of, and what was once the core of, its research collection.

The four libraries thus being dismantled were the four most important central destination libraries in Manhattan. SIBL was a state of the art library just completed in 1996 and the Central Reference Library has last been expanded in 2002.

While Sherman's mention of Booz Allen Hamiltion being hired describes the firm as "a gargantuan consulting firm that derives much of its revenue from U.S. military and intelligence agencies," he did not follow up on the implications of that passing statement.

Mr. Sherman's book was the culmination of work he had done writing series of articles about the library destruction that appeared in The Nation.  In the last of those articles, (The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan- Why did one of the world's greatest libraries adopt a $300 million transformation without any real public debate? August 28, 2013) he expressed some anxious concern about what Booz was up to, but neglected to identify Booz as a spy agency, instead identifying it to readers of The Nation in alternative, if related, terms:
Finally, what was the role of Booz Allen Hamilton—the gargantuan consulting firm whose tentacles reach into the defense, energy, transportation and financial service sectors—which was hired by the NYPL in 2007 to formulate what became known inside the trustee meetings as “the strategy”?
If librarians were the first to successfully stand up and oppose the intelligence overreaching and if Booz Allen Hamilton “is really an arm of the intelligence community” involved with the federal government’s “most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years” then why was Booz Allen Hamilton hired to help reorganize the New York Public Library's most important libraries?

One might expect that the intelligence community's reaction to being thwarted by librarians pushing back to resist the PATRIOT Act might have been a little like the intelligence community's reaction to Edward Snowden's questioning the scope of their surveillance.  What was the intelligence community's reaction to Snowden?  If you have been following it, it was harsh, but one example was Richard C. Schaeffer's reaction to Snowden at New York County Lawyers Association, "Government Surveillance and Privacy Have We Reached a Tipping Point," held June 11, 2015 . . .

“My opinion is one day Edward Snowden will rot in hell,” said Mr. Schaeffer.  The conference with panelists representing the spectrum of opinion involved the dissection of complicated and intricate national security law questions in what is normally fairly genteel `lawyer speak' so Schaeffer's remark really stood out and generated comment.  According to his bio Mr. Schaeffer, having moved on to become a V.P. of  Emerging Technologies & Markets at KEYW, was a former Senior Executive with the National Security Agency (NSA) with over 40 years total U.S. Government service, including 15 years as a member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service.

"Rot in hell" is the reaction after Snowden's revelations prompted all three branches to change course and, at least ostensibly, rein in the unchecked overreach on the collection of data on U.S. citizens?  Some of what was going on has already been ruled illegal by the judiciary and perhaps more will be in the future.  The Fourth Estate, the press, also became less quiescent and began doing a better job of covering these issues. Prior to Snowden's revelations all three branches of government (and with its quiescence much of the press) had blessed what was happening and the Executive Branch had publicly lied to Congress about the extent to which such collection was going on and because members of Congress there listening knew they were being lied to there was complicity in that lie to the American people.  It was only when there was transparency so that the public knew, that the three branches of government became accountable and changed course.

It is odd to think of calling for Snowden to "rot in hell," when you consider everything that Snowden had to give up in his life, and the extreme risk he subjected himself to, by coming forward with his revelations.  At the conference it was noted that, when it came to "motives" on the part of Snowden, venal motives did not apply: Money?- No, Power?- No, Career?- No. .  Even peculiar ideology?- No!.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, the motives of people in the intelligence community do show up far too often as "money, money, money" and "career, career, career."  That's something one could say the privatization of spying for profit is all about.

In the Bloomberg Businessweek article about Booz Allen, Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, spoke about the way people in the industry are milking the revolving door for profit saying: "You have to have a well-developed sense of patriotism to turn that money down."  The article asserts that Snowden is an "anomaly":
What he did with that information-copying it, getting it to the press, and publicly identifying himself as the leaker-cost him his job and potentially his freedom, all for what appear so far to be idealistic motives. The more common temptation would be to use knowledge, legally and perhaps not even consciously, to generate more business.
Richard Shaeffer can be linked to Booz Allen through INSA, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.  It was attendees of an INSA conference who in June of 2013 were reported to have been overheard saying that both Glen Greenwald and Edward Snowden should be disappeared.  See: INSA – How Money and Power Corrupts National Security, by Tim Shorrock, June 9, 2013.

More temperately, Mr. Shaeffer also said at the conference that he endorsed reactions to Mr. Snowden's revelations expressed by Robert S. Litt.  Although when he attended, Mr. Litt was General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence he was participating in the discussion only in a personal capacity for educational purposes and not in his official capacity or for attribution of his remarks in such official capacity.

Mr. Litt said that while other people had changed their minds about what should be surveiled he hadn't and what he said indicated that he was thinking more constructively about how to go forward.  He averred that because of what he viewed as the serious damage of the Snowden leaks there was a need to rebuild capabilities, and that most significant was the loss of relationships with US companies so that work would have to be done rethinking the historic relationship of those companies assisting the government as good corporate citizens.

When the government surveillance establishment learned that libraries and librarians, at least many of them, were not going to cooperate in being turned into instruments of wholesale surveillance do we think that they weren't annoyed and that these government officials just turned away and went home?  Or do we think that they decided to put on their thinking caps and construct another way to skin the cat?  Hence the very odd, and otherwise almost impossible to explain decision to hire Booz Allen Hamilton, ""an arm of the intelligence community” involved with the federal government’s “most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years” to help reorganize the New York Public Library's most important libraries?

What is different at the libraries these days?  Books have disappeared, more and more of them moved off site.  You have to request them electronically, and if you request them electronically. . .  Or you might settle for obtaining them digitally, oddly, a more expensive proposition for the library.  Perhaps you'd like to settle for the the more corporate-culture, elite media froth that, promoted, bubbles up most readily to the surface of the internet (and hope that "net neutrality" such as we currently experience continues into the future with nothing like the TPP to bring us a son-of-SOPA).  . . .  It has become increasing difficult to go into a library and study and learn by just browsing.  The librarians who can help you, especially the experienced librarians, longest there with a sense of history, are disappearing too.  (For instance, here is more of what's in store: the NYPL research libraries once employed 829 salaried employees and 366 hourly employees, but it was recently announced that they will soon employ only 460.)

In the case of the NYPL's once world class and esteemed 42nd Street Central Reference Library, millions of books that have disappeared from the library went to the ReCAP facility site in New Jersey where they are now entombed.  Because ReCAP shares space at Princeton University nearby the Forrestal Campus, a complex which has stringent federal security requirements as a laboratory devoted to nuclear fusion and plasma physics research, a public demonstration to protest the books' loss was effectively prohibited.  That's ominous. Meanwhile, at this location the library's own books are being consolidated into the collections of others at this facility and  there is "de-duping" of books, destroying or casting aside as not valuable what they refer derisively to as "artifactual originals.". .

. . .  It is worth noting that duplicate books do have a purpose.  After World War II many of Germany's books had been purposely destroyed by the government, lost to its libraries.  One way that German library collections could be reestablished, the books replenished, was because there were duplicate books made available to the libraries in Germany from libraries in Australia.

It would be nice to know that the bad news about dismantling libraries laid out above stops here.  It doesn't.  Libraries, as we knew them, are being dismantled or "re-imagined" without their traditional access  to books throughout New York.

There is good news, but only partial.  It is good that the NYPL plans in connection with which the spy agency Booz Allen Hamilton was hired did not proceed exactly as envisioned due largely to the organized opposition of community activists, including the Committee to Save the New York Public Library, of which I am a part and Citizens Defending Libraries of which I am one of the co-founders.  Citizens Defending Libraries was one of the plaintiffs, together with a group of high-profile scholars, that brought two of the three lawsuits that stalled, through the December 31st 2013 end of the Mayor Michael Bloomberg administration, the NYPL's Booz-imprinted Central Library Plan that was otherwise destined to dismantle Manhattan's three most important remaining central destination libraries, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL.

Unfortunately, by this time the esteemed Donnell Library had already been destroyed, plundered by the real estate industry with the NYPL receiving an appallingly small pittance as its eyewash to explain the dismal shedding of such an asset.  Also unfortunately, while the Mid-Manhattan Library is no longer slated for sale and while destruction of the research stacks at the 42nd Street Library has been prevented or at least forestalled, there are still plans to shrink the Mid-Manhattan Library and millions of research books have not been brought back to the Central Reference Library.  Over a million books are also missing from SIBL, much of its recently built research bookshelf space has been sold, and the NYPL persists in its plans to sell the exceptional and still extensive public space that remains at SIBL-  The consolidation to cram what remains of SIBL into its premises is what will shrink the current Mid-Manhattan.  Up through at least 2001, the end of the Mayor Giuliani administration, the NYPL's plan had been the reverse, to nearly double the size of Mid-Manhattan.

Meanwhile, the kind of odd dismantling transactions that Booz Allen helped inaugurate at the NYPL were being replicated elsewhere in the city, expanding to the city's other libraries and systems.  New York's libraries are entrusted to three systems that historically grew up separately: The Brooklyn Public Library is in charge of Brooklyn's libraries, the Queens Library oversees those of Queens, and the NYPL has responsibility for all the rest, those in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too.

At the same time a shrink-and-sink real estate deal was concocted that would extinguish the central destination Donnell Library was devised and launched, a virtually identical shrink-and-sink real estate deal (with an overlap of people in the background) was ginned up for Brooklyn's second largest and most important library, the central destination Brooklyn Heights Library in Downtown Brooklyn at the confluence of all the city's public transportation lines in that borough.  The library, greatly enlarged and fully upgraded in 1993 is, except for the BPL's main Central Destination library at Grand Army Plaza, probably the most up-to-date and capable in terms of modern computer support.  It is also a Federal Depository Library, part of a system essential to providing information to the public and archiving history about the federal government.

At a March 9, 2015 public meeting about the proposed Heights library destruction BPL president Linda Johnson nonchalantly dismissed my question about the library's Federal Depository Library function saying.: “I am not even sure exactly what you mean by a Federal Depository.”   That kind of outwardly cavalier attitude, albeit by a non-librarian (essentially a political agent) put in charge of the borough's libraries, should concern us about how readily the nationwide program could be compromised.

Early on in minutes of the BPL, and ultimately in statements made publicly by Linda Johnson herself, it was clear that the real estate strategy effecting the shrink-and-sink plunder of the Heights library, the consequent banishment of most of its books, was one that would be extended to all of the BPL's libraries, all of the BPL's "real estate," that for the BPL the assault on the Heights library was just the first maneuver.  In fact, when the shrink-and-sink Heights deal went before the New York City Council on November 18, 2015, Johnson was ready to proclaim that it would be viewed as a model for other deals throughout the city and in all three systems as Ms. Johnson testified at City Council’s hearing on the matter.  Days later, December 15, 2015, much the same was said as the City Council approval of the library sale triumphantly reported to the BPL's board of trustees, who were told that this was a “huge turning point for the library system” and “across the city in general” and that Johnson was `pioneering’ the future of libraries.

The BPL trustees were also told at an earlier meeting that its plans would be a model for other urban areas throughout the country.  Insight about the kind of shifts being encouraged alongside the real estate deals can be gleaned from what the BPL trustees were told more recently at a meeting February 23nd of this year, when they had described to them an "exciting" "incubator" initiative, intended to have its librarians "change their roles" from being "information oriented," using what they learned in "library school" because "the profession has changed, it's not about reference anymore."  Instead, with the initiative that senior staff hoped to "scale" up and "push the envelope," the senior staff leading the library was seeking to quell or "manage" librarian's "risk aversion," and have librarians learn "project management skills,"  how to build and run projects working with "partners" from the private sector (all the librarians tapped for the first cycle of this new training "had to identify a partner").  The trustees were told that this initiative was being worked on at the library by the following departments: Strategy (translate real estate), IT (information technology), Government Affairs and Public Service had been working on.

Activism by resistant community groups including Citizens Defending Libraries has impeded or prevented some of the more city-wide plans that Johnson spoke about: Previously announced as a top priority along with the Heights real estate deal, the BPL's sale of the Pacific Branch is not currently being openly pursued. The BPL and Spaceworks backed off on a privatizing shrinkage of the Red Hook Library, although the alarm about Spaceworks was not sounded early enough to prevent it from taking over the second floor of the Williamsburg Library.   An alerted Sunset Park Community has mobilized and is in a much better place to defend itself against previously secret plans to turn its library into a multi-use real estate project.

Still, the fact is that battles are likely to be lost and new aspects of the unfolding plans continue to surface. At each of its last two board meetings the NYPL revealed that another of its libraries was being targeted for real estate deals.  One library, subject of negotiations with Mayor de Blasio's administration, is an unidentified library in northern Manhattan, likely Harlem.  In 2008 information came out, although not specific about plans for what appeared to be another consolidating shrinkage in northern Manhattan.  The second library which has not been identified is, from information a NYPL trustee let slip, is apparently the Jerome Park Library in the Bronx. 

But it has been a long time since the spy agency Booz Allen Hamilton was involved in all this dismantling. . . Or has it been?

In 2011 and 2012 all three library systems, the NYPL, the BPL and the Queens Library, engaged Booz & Co in a consolidated hiring arrangement that involved City Hall and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's First Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris.  Over the course of two years, a slew of meeting's were held at locations like Gracie Mansion and City Hall with Booz & Co attended by Ms. Harris and the library heads and representatives.  The meetings were definitely to touch upon matters related to the library sales (to "right size operations") and the announcement of the Booz engagement to the BPL board was at at the same meeting where it received a presentation about the borough-wide real estate strategy, but the engagement of Booz as explained to the BPL board extended to more than that:
to increase efficiency . . to develop strategic cost-cutting measures . . . improve efficiency and generally improve service to patrons . .  find areas for collaboration amongst the systems to improve the operations and reduce the operating costs of all three [NYC Library systems].
The October 13. 2011 Queens Library minutes describe the contract being pursued with Booz & Co. somewhat similarly:
to study technical services operations for best practices and potential cost savings through shared services.
Those minutes disclose that while all three libraries paying for this engagement much of the cost of the Booz & Co. contract was being picked up by Bloomberg's City Hall and the Revson Foundation.
  
Now, before getting too excited about Booz & Co. assuming these functions in connection with an extension of reorganization of NYC libraries similar to and seeming flowing out of the NYPL Central Library Plan for which Booz Allen was responsible, it is necessary to make a technical distinction between Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Co.  Booz & Co. was created by Booz Allen Hamilton and spun off from it in 2008 when Booz Allen Hamilton was being acquired by the Carlyle Group.  So arguably it could said that Booz & Co., the acorn falling far from the tree, might not be expected to engage in the spy business.  More recently, in 2014, Booz & Co. has changed names again merging with PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) to form the consulting firm "Strategy&."  But Tim Shorrock, author of "Spies For Hire" also lists PricewaterhouseCoopers as a company known to have done work for the NSA.

So who exactly were the NYC library systems hiring back in 2011?  What kind of Booz?

BPL President Linda Johnson, explaining the hiring of Booz to her board February 8, 2011, told them that, "Booz came to BPL with extensive experience with libraries."  Was this "extensive experience" anything more than than the work Booz Allen Hamilton did for the NYPL when hired for the "radical overhaul at the NYPL"?  Similarly, the minutes say that when Queens Library President Thomas Galante met with his trustees in Executive Session (i.e. secret session) on April 28, 2011, reporting that he was meeting with Booz & Company about a possible future consulting agreement, the firm was described as having "been used by the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library for public service staffing model assessments."

The minutes of the NYPL do not seem to ever refer to its engagement of Booz and Co. at this time to advise it either on "right-sizing" its real estate footprint or with respect to these other matters like digitizing or introducing a new focus on metrics.  Notwithstanding, in that 2011 period the NYPL was very busy selling the bookshelves that held over a million books at SIBL and selling the 42nd Street Annex, another major piece of book-holding real estate serving as an ancillary facility for the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  The February 9, 2011 NYPL minutes do say this however, "Brooklyn is also engaging Booz Allen, [not Booz and Co.] which served as consultants in assisting NYPL to develop its new strategy.  Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris has called on representatives of each of the three library systems to attend a meeting on March 7 to discuss potential for collaboration"  (one of the multiple tri-li meetings held).
  
Searching the website of "Strategy&." the continuation of Booz & Co., there are no apparent references to expertise on the part of the firm or "extensive experience with libraries."   Who were the Booz representatives that showed up at various meetings?  Although there are frequent mentions of Booz & Co. in available documentation of the meeting of Booz & Co. as a company meeting with the three library systems (tri-li meetings- "tri-library system" meetings) the apparently low-profile individuals representing Booz never seem to get named in relevant documents the way that representatives from other companies do.  Perhaps more concerning given Booz Allen Hamilton's reputation as a spy agency, with proper searching, it is possible to pull up a reference to Booz Allen Hamilton having conducted a management study of the Library of Congress in 1996.

It ought to be possible to provide a great deal more information about the Booz & Co. contract the City Hall entered into with the library systems in 2011 by virtue of the Freedom of Information act request for such information we made of the Brooklyn Public Library in 2014, but the BPL has stonewalled, refusing to provide the information it ought to have made public about the contract.

The potential distinction between Booz Allen Hamilton as a spy agency contracting directly with the government to conduct espionage versus Booz & Co. as a consulting firm working only for the private sector and accessing information the government can only get its hands on through other means is an important one legally and and from the standpoint of perceptual optics.  In national security law there is something called the "third party doctrine" which holds that US citizens give up their expectation of privacy and protection from unreasonable searches under the Fourth Amendment with respect to information they willingly put into the hands of independent third parties.  Further, we think we have less to fear from private companies.  Since the private sector doesn't have the same capacity or arrest us or the same motives to target us (for things other than advertising), we a less likely to be perturbed when Google, not the government, roams streets around the US, and the world in general, collecting a comprehensive photographic catalogue of everything in our neighborhoods and "sniffing" unencrypted Wi-Fi traffic.

I have been asked by those suffering enormous frustration and bewilderment why the real estate shenanigans dismantling our libraries haven't been the subject of numerous and through investigations.  The rushed and secretive sale and shrinkage of the Donnell Library (with a subsequent "ratification" by the NYPL board) stank and looked like an obvious scam with only the merest pretense of an effective bid:  There were only two ostensible bidders on the secret sale and since both bidders were inevitably destined to be doing a coordinated real estate deal there was no real incentive for them not already to be acting in partnership.

The sale was kept confidential until the last possible minute.  It was finally announced publicly in November of 2007 only because, as a publicly traded company, the purchaser, Oriental Express Hotels Ltd., had to disclose the agreement within within four days of the execution of the transaction.  The NYPL was then prepared so that, when announced, the public relations firm of Howard Rubenstein, called the ''dean of damage control'' (for the powerful) by Mayor Guiliani, would be ready to handle the press which was furnished information that ultimately proved be a very inaccurate representation of the transaction.

There was also the Blackstone Group, its head Stephen Shwarzman on the NYPL board, then lurking in the background.

The extremely valuable five-story Donnell Library, almost 100,000 square feet across from MoMA on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was sold for a pittance, netting the NYPL less than $20 million.  The penthouse in the luxury tower that replaced it was put on the market for $60 million and other apartments in the building are regularly sold for more than $20 million.  The luxury hotel component in the building was sold to the Chinese in a record-setting transaction for more than $230 million.

Yet when this was brought to New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman whose office regulates charities such as the NYPL and is supposed to prevent the kind of abuse that apparently occurred here and endorse other laws that would likely be pertinent here he had no interest in investigating.

One must wonder whether, when it comes to investigating library sell-off abuses, our local New York politicians are a bunch of gutless wonders.  New York City Public Advocate Tish James, who came into office promising to stand up against the abusive sell-off of public assets specifically citing libraries in particular has, nearly four years later, never stepped into the breach to use the powers of her office to that effect.

We buttonholed Comptroller Stringer just the other day and complained about his non-investigation of the library together with his failure to produce the BPL library audit he promised“I don’t investigate libraries,” he said.   We responded that his website, his press releases and public statements all represent that he does investigate corruption, fraud and abuse and the waste of city funds.  And Comptroller did produce an audit of the Queens Library where he went into details about much less significant matters, involving what were, comparatively, just a few dollars: How the former Queens Library head improperly used his library credit card to put gasoline in his other family members’ cars.

There is, however, apparently one criminal investigation: US Attorney Preet Bharara is understood to be investigating Mayor de Blasio's apparent pay-to-play hand-off the Brooklyn Heights Library.  Like the way that an effective and above-board bid process was apparently side-stepped with the Donnell Library to hand off the library real estate to a new owner for far less than its value, the Brooklyn Heights Library is being handed off for far less than its value to the public and is being given to a developer who was not the high bidder.

When the frustrated and bewildered ask about it, it is easy to account for the lack of investigation by our New York officials by blaming it on the usual suspects and say that it is all about the power and influence of the real estate industry on politicians through campaign contribution and otherwise.  That's no doubt part of it: the real estate industry in New York these days is regularly one of New York's most dependable villains.

But maybe something more is going on that can account for the strange absence of courage on the part of our local officials.  When it comes to surveillance by the government there is something called the "state secrets privilege."  When it comes to criminal conduct, fraud and abuse it can act as a "get out of jail free" card.  It can effectively halt both legal and criminal proceedings.  It allows the exclusion of evidence in legal proceedings based on assertions by the government (often enough, not true or justified) that proceedings involving the evidence might endanger national security.  If, without referring to that evidence, a plaintiff can't make their case a proceeding terminates.  If a defendant accused of misconduct, injuring another, or a crime can't make their case, without referring to that evidence, a proceeding terminates.

No doubt investigators and potential prosecutors are sensitive to the doctrine even in the earliest stages of inquiry and can be fended off.  The career of a US Attorney like Preet Bharara inevitably depends not only on his taking on corruption and major elected officials; it also depends on public perception that he is tough on terrorists. And it means weighing in on subjects like the government's surveillance and third party assistance in that regard.  It is frustrating how intricately connected this can all get.
   
Does this mean that if "national security" can be invoked and government surveillance is involved people can corruptly carve up and fire-sale our public assets like libraries with impunity?  Those involved with dismantling our libraries have certainly seemed to act like they have nothing to fear.  Unfortunately, one price we pay as the spending increases on surveillance and the dollars flowing out increasingly pervade the private sector is that transparency and oversight, the bulwarks against corruption, diminish. Notwithstanding, the state secrets privilege can be extremely problematic, but good investigators and prosecutors will do their best to make their case anyway even if it is more of an uphill battle. . .

Perhaps, given all these intersections, Preet Bharara is the perfect individual, with the perfect powers to be investigating these matters.  Perhaps not.  We shall see.  One bad thing about criminal investigations is that when they are underway the criminal investigators will never tell you what is happening or what to expect.  And I suppose, conversely, that one good thing about criminal investigations is that because they won't tell you, you can always, at least from the public's viewpoint, expect and root for the best to happen. That may keep the bad guys a little off guard.

Government surveillance is a national issue.  Can we expect, at least with libraries, something better from the next president?  Well, both candidates likely to win, the Republican and the Democrat, have connections to the NYC library real estate sales. . .

. . . The Brooklyn Heights Library is immediately adjacent to the Forest City Ratner owned building where Hillary has her national campaign headquarters.  The building is even, for development purposes, part of the same real estate development parcel as Hillary’s headquarters, thus constituting Hillary’s Forest City Ratner landlord a gatekeeper to the library sale, shrink-and-sink transaction.  Ironically perhaps, the library given the intersection of the streets where it is located, is the “Tillary Clinton Library.”  Hillary Clinton did not answer Citizen Defending Library calls to come forth and oppose this privatization of public assets.

. . . As for Donald Trump, remember that the shrink-and-sink sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library was modeled on the shrink-and-sink sale of the Donnell Library (with an overlap of the people behind both) and one of the principal financial beneficiaries of the secret sale of Donnell was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top campaign advisor.

Here is something to mull and wonder over, perhaps allowing us to conclude on a more heartening note?   It is so oddly coincident I would be remiss not to mention it.  On September 19, 2007, as the NYPL trustees were getting ready to sell Donnell and launch the destructive Central Library Plan, the trustees were thinking about the PATRIOT act-  Board Chair Catherine Marron brought it up her Chairman's report after telling the the trustees about a September 11, 2007 Celebration of Brooke Russell Astor.  She noted that  "an important opinion on the USA PATRIOT Act" had been handed down (September 7th) by NYPL Trustee Victor Marrero serving as United States District Court Judge Southern District of New York (appointed by Clinton in 1999).  . .

Judge Marrero's decision, in the same vein as another he issued, struck down controversial portions of the USA PATRIOT Act according to the Washington Post, ordering the FBI to stop its wide use of warrantless, secret "national security letters" (NSLs) to demand e-mail and telephone data from private companies.

He said in his opinion it was "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values."  The FBI usually orders that the national security letters be kept secret, thus creating much the same impediment to policy-setting and/or in any way challenging these actions, that Snowden addressed because Americans didn't know that they were subject to surveillance and probably actually believed that they weren't.  Marrero said in his opinion:
The risk of investing the FBI with unchecked discretion to restrict such speech is that government agents, based on their own self-certification, may limit speech that does not pose a significant threat to national security or other compelling government interest
Well enough that that Judge and NYPL Trustee Marrero issued such an opinion for the protection of the public, but we must return again to the big unanswered question we are addressing here: Why was a top U.S. intelligence spy agency engaged for radical overhaul of libraries as we have traditionally known them?

Even if you believe that libraries should be re-envisioned so that they no longer constitute the zones of privacy as they traditionally were in the past, and instead become zones of surveillance, what about public debate of the related questions?  The reduced and restricted availability of knowledge?  The dumbing down of the American public?  (Could this presidential election cycle ever be more dumbed down than it is?)   What about resisting pressure to altering libraries in other ways that might be good for others, like those in the internet and tech industry, but not good the public?  For instance, as the NYPL trustees were considering how they would re-envision their key NYC libraries under the Central Library Plan they were cautioned by NYPL president Tony Marx about not treading into the territory that should be reserved for "Google" and "Amazon."

As Snowden made clear with his revelations, there can be no effective debate if the public doesn't even know what is happening.  In other words, there is a high price in our democracy for maintaining `perfect security' . . . . And we must ask whether that is, in fact, exactly what is going on here.