Spying? At the library?

WHY, EXACTLY , is the San Francisco Public Library moving to adopt an intrusive new technology that has the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation up in arms? We still haven't heard a good answer to that question – which is an excellent reason to scrap the plan.

The issue revolves around radio frequency identification, a high-tech solution to what could be at most a minor problem. In simple terms, the library wants to put special microchips in the binding of all its books so it can track them on a central database. That's a scary thought for civil libertarians – in theory, the RFID could allow the library to track books back to people's homes – who say government surveillance of individuals is already far too intrusive.

According to city librarian Susan Hildreth, the signals wouldn't go beyond the library buildings. The library, she insists, has no desire to use RFID to monitor individuals, or even to go after overdue-book scofflaws. It's purely an internal tool, she says, to allow staffers to find a book that may have been left out on a table or filed on the wrong shelf, and to allow for automated checkout.

Maybe so – but the price tag for this gizmo is $1 million, and that's a lot of money to spend picking up books that went into the wrong storage bin. It's hard to believe San Francisco's librarians are so badly organized that they need a pricey techno solution to a sorting and filing problem. As some critics, like author Christian Parenti, point out, the library needs that money, badly, to buy more books; why waste it on something nobody beside Hildreth really seems to want?

In the worst case, the library will end up owning a system that could be used to figure out who's reading what on BART and which books are sitting in some poor borrower's bathroom. The ACLU and the EFF are right to be alarmed about that prospect – in the Ashcroft era, even the potential for that sort of intrusive behavior has no place in San Francisco (much less in the public library). In the best case, the library is preparing to spend a big chunk of change on the wrong solution to a fairly modest problem.

Either way, this RFID plan ought to go in the reject bin.