AALL, ALA, ARL, and Others Express Concerns Over Privacy Record of Nominee for Attorney General of the United States, Senator Jeff Sessions
A coalition of organizations including AALL, ALA, ARL have sent a letter to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee re: the Nominee for Attorney General of the United States, Senator Jeff Sessions.
The complete letter (approx. 2200 words) can be accessed on the Center for Democracy & Technology website. A PDF version is also available.
The letter begins:
We are writing to express our concerns about the privacy record of the President-Elect’s nominee for Attorney General of the United States, Senator Jeff Sessions. Senator Sessions has been a leading proponent of expanding the government’s surveillance of ordinary Americans at the expense of civil rights and civil liberties. He has spent his 20-year career in the Senate arguing for broad, often unchecked surveillance powers in intelligence investigations, even though those investigations pose unnecessarily invasive risks to privacy. Senator Sessions has staunchly defended the USA Patriot Act’s most controversial and privacy invasive provisions, calling the Act “a restrained piece of legislation.”[1] He has advocated for broader surveillance powers than the intelligence community (IC) itself has asked for and opposed the USA Freedom Act, which the IC supported.
and concludes:
We urge you to carefully investigate Senator Sessions’s record on privacy and seek assurances that he will not pursue policies that undermine Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.
The letter is signed by 15 organizations:
Access Now
Alliance for Citizenship
American Association of Law Libraries
American Library Association
Amnesty International USA
Association of Research Libraries
Center for Democracy & Technology
Constitutional Alliance
Constitution Project
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Liberty Coalition
National Bar Association
New America’s Open Technology Institute
Restore the Fourth
Voting Rights Forward
Direct to Full Text Letter (approx. 2200 words)
UPDATE
Keyword Searchable Video of the Senate Judiciary’s Committee Hearing For Attorney General is Available Here
Sen. Sessions Has Appeared on C–SPAN Nearly 1700 Times.
All of his appearances, can be searched by keyword and then viewed online.
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Libraries, News

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.