Alison Macrina is executive director of the Library Freedom Project, a not-for-profit organization that supports long-term collective organizing to mitigate the harms of living in a surveillance society. She was the keynote speaker at the 2022 CAUT Librarians’ and Archivists’ Conference.

You’ve described a hostile working environment for librarians in the United States. How bad is it?​

It’s an extremely hostile climate toward library workers in the United States, having to do with the rise of the organized right wing. Privacy is a big piece of it because there’s so much personal targeting of librarians and attempts to smear them literally as pedophiles for offering diverse books to children.

It’s an enormously organized campaign trying to remove books from libraries that have to do with the LBGTQ experience or the Black experience, and personally harassing library workers. We’ve seen groups trying to get the name and personal information of librarians, if they’re married, where they live, their private lives, publishing the information and using it to create harassment campaigns against them. It’s happening in every single state in every city.

I think it is something Canadians would do well to be concerned about and start preparing for the possibility. We were all caught unaware, and no one here is prepared for what we’re experiencing.

Where should people start to challenge this?

We need enormous shifts in what we demand from big data companies and from law enforcement and other actors. There’s a whole environment of data exploitation. Data is very valuable and there are many different entities that want that information for different reasons.

We’re talking about data vendors that are amassing so much power that they are accountable to no one. We’re talking about some of the biggest and most powerful companies that have ever existed in the world. We’re talking about law enforcement that are totally unaccountable. Our federal police, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have broad powers to surveil any person for almost any reason.

As librarians who care about things like information democracy and access and privacy and intellectual freedom, we have a role to play to help our communities understand the hostilities of this environment, help them understand their data and how to safeguard it against whatever threats they’re concerned about.

I would advise people who are vulnerable to be frugal with their use of social media because they can reveal all kinds of personal information. Things like stronger passwords are good advice for anybody, making sure that your software is updated so that you don’t inadvertently get any virus or malware on your computer, using encrypted texting apps.

Some of the risks people fear when challenging the big data vendors are harassment, lawsuits, and job security.

Some of those risks are there for sure and they’re very real in the library world. Our professional organizations need to be offering support for the people who are taking risks. They can do all kinds of things. They can write letters in support of an academic who’s being targeted, condemning the harassment and offering their support to the person.

What we’re starting to explore in the U.S. is creating a kind of strike fund for people who are targeted by harassment campaigns.

Our professional organizations can offer direct support and create spaces for connections among librarians and training and advice and talk with a clear-eyed view of what is at stake here because part of what is at stake is our democratic ideals.

Have you been targeted?

I did experience some online harassment from neo-Nazis and fascists, but it only lasted a few weeks. It was useful for me in understanding in a personal way how to deal with these kinds of targeting. But I was very fortunate that I had already been taking my own advice. So, I wasn’t really put in any significant danger and there was very little for them to find out about me.

What can an organization like CAUT do to stand up to the big data companies?

An organized group [like CAUT] can do things like a letter-writing effort to the shareholders of these companies. They can make bigger, more substantive threats than an individual library can about cancelling contracts — we’re going to advise our membership not to buy these data bases if you don’t comply with basic human rights.

In terms of the bigger data companies like Google and Facebook, it comes down to potential lobbying power. We need better laws that put guardrails around these companies and what they can do.In the library world I don’t think that we understand that we have that kind of collective power, but we absolutely do. It’s just a matter of exercising it.