The message of the posters on the walls of Skokie library is plain: Big Brother is watching you. The signs, put up by librarian Caroline Anthony, warn of the radical new laws that have given the US government power to monitor the reading habits of its citizens without telling them.
Now the FBI can also secretly record what Web sites people look at. And what books they buy. Or videos they hire.
"Libraries are all about freedom of knowledge and not having Big Brother watching you," Anthony said. "We had to warn our users."
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
She believed Skokie was particularly at risk. The Chicago suburb has a large population of immigrants, including many from countries such as Iraq and Iran. Two years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Anthony and many others think the US is in the grip of a frightening extension of state power.
At the center of it is the Patriot Act, rushed through in the wake of the attacks to give authorities the legal weapons they needed to fight the "war on terror." Instead, critics say, those weapons have also hit at America's own civil rights and freedoms.
The act allowed the FBI to pull records from libraries and bookstores, defined "terrorism" to include direct action by protesters, widened the use of wire-tapping on phone calls and e-mails and paved the way for the mass internment without charge of several thousand foreign nationals. The most vulnerable are Arabs, Asians and Muslims.
"Essentially this is the most massive case of ethnic profiling since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and author of a forthcoming book on the subject, Enemy Aliens.
The government refuses to reveal the number of foreign nationals it holds without charge. But even those released and deported are still victims. The shadow of being detained for suspicion of terrorism is not easily lifted. Certainly Akil Sachveda is suffering.
He is now a part-time pump attendant in Toronto, Canada. He used to own a petrol station, a bar and a pool hall in New Jersey, until one day the FBI came looking for an ex-employee who was a Muslim. The man had left but they arrested Sachveda instead on suspicion of Islamic terrorism, despite the fact he is a Hindu. He was held for five months and given no access to a lawyer. Prison guards threatened his life. Eventually he was deported to Canada. He was never charged, but he had lost everything.
"It is so painful. It was terrifying, but you can't fight the government," he said.
Sachveda now can't get a full-time job. His spell in prison puts off employers.
"You either don't get an interview or they let you go as soon as they find out. But I never did anything wrong," he said.
The extensions of state power go beyond round-ups and the Patriot Act. The FBI has secretly recruited campus police officers to monitor students and academics. The scheme was only uncovered after the interrogation of a Sri Lankan campus union organizer at the University of Massachusetts. Yaju Dharmarajah had applied to help with a state emergency co-ordination agency as part of plans to become an aid worker. But his Asian name and accent instead brought the local campus FBI officer to his house.
"They thought I wanted to video their work as part of a terrorist plot," he said.
"I am lucky. I have a white American wife. If she was Sri Lankan like me, I wouldn't have said anything for fear they would deport us," Dharmarajah said.
Others are also afraid. Last year Sister Virgine Lawinger, a 74-year-old Milwaukee nun, was travelling to an anti-war rally. But she was on a list of people considered too dangerous to fly and was stopped from boarding her plane. She believes her politics were to blame.
"People should not be naive. My experience just raised the stakes for me. It shows we have to be even more alert to protecting our democracy," she said.
Jan Adams, a journalist on the anti-war San Francisco newspaper War Times, has also been stopped at airports, as has her colleague Rebecca Gordon. New York lawyer Barbara Olshansky, who is involved in several anti-Patriot Act suits, is stopped almost every time she flies. She is frequently subjected to strip and full-body searches.
She now fears to leave the US, despite being an American citizen, out of concern she will not be allowed back. It has made her angry.
"It is becoming an awful witch-hunt. At first I didn't believe it, but now it is just horrifying to me," she said.
But there is a growing movement to try to roll back the act. It is gathering support from across the political spectrum, including such notable Republicans as Idaho's Senator "Butch" Otter, who has led an effort in Congress to curtail some of the act's powers.
Across the US more than 150 cities and counties have passed local legislation "opting out" of the Patriot Act. In Boise, Idaho, a Republican stronghold, a group calling itself the Boise Patriots is hoping to force the city council to add their city to the list.
They are a diverse group, including anti-abortionists, women's rights groups, environmentalists and pro-gun lobbyists.
"If enough communities join this effort, we can roll this law right back," said founder Gwen Sanchirico.
The movement has become so powerful that Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a nationwide tour to promote the Patriot Act.
But it is already too late for some. Sachveda is not adjusting well to his newfound poverty and exile from his adopted home.
"I lost everything. It would have been better if I had never come to America," he said.
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