Erase to the top?
By Cosmo Garvin
cosmog@newsreview.com
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Related stories: Goodbye Books? Sacramento readers, writers and book-lovers respond to the electronic migration.SN&R, 04.07.11. Me and my Kindle She wanted e-reader love, but must settle for just being friends. SN&R, 04.07.11. |
If you haven’t already, go read Hugh Biggar and Kel Munger’s cover story on the future of reading (see “Goodbye, books?” SN&R Feature). But wait—finish this column first.
As long as there have been readers, there have been nosy government agents who want to know what we’re reading.
In the United States, we’ve been mostly successful at telling them to get lost. But the rise of e-books and online book ordering is giving the agents new opportunities to snoop.
A new bill by California state Sen. Leland Yee, Senate Bill 602, would make it harder, requiring a warrant to snoop into reader records on sites like Google Books and Amazon.com.
“We should be able to read about anything from politics to religion to health without worrying that the government might be looking over our shoulder,” said Valerie Small Navarro, with the American Civil Liberties Union of