Americans have accepted a considerable number of infringements on their personal freedom in the name of increased safety after the 9/11 attacks.

One of these is a measure in the USA Patriot Act, now up for congressional review, that says law enforcement officials can look at library records of what people read. Even worse is that librarians are not even allowed to tell a reader that federal, state or local law enforcement officials have asked to see the library's records.

The Bush administration has countered by claiming that it hasn't been using the measure. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft said flatly in 2003 that the Justice Department doesn't care what people are reading.

An extensive study released this week by the 64,000-member American Library Association of 1,500 public libraries and 4,008 academic libraries, indicates that the Bush administration's reassurances were misleading, or false. Libraries reported 203 formal and informal federal, state or local law enforcement inquiries to them on users' reading lists and other internal library matters since October 2001.

Some requests for information came in the form of subpoenas. Others were informal. Some libraries didn't reply to the survey because they felt that it could be considered a violation of law. Some libraries have decided to deal with the government attempt at infringement on intellectual freedom by simply ceasing to keep records of what people read. Public libraries that responded to the survey estimated that some 40 percent of their readers had asked about law enforcement officers' ability to look at the libraries' records -- clearly a deterrent to library use in itself.

The basic question is whether the additional information this measure might produce is worth Americans paying what is clearly a high cost in terms of intellectual freedom. In fact, Americans these days would be well advised to be as well informed as they can about subjects such as al Qaida, the Taliban, the psychology of Osama bin Laden and Islamic terrorism. But how would they like to find themselves explaining to a state trooper why they took a book on one of those subjects out of the library? This also means that a teacher would not dare send a student to the library to research one of these important subjects.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted recently by 238-187 -- including 38 Republicans voting with the majority -- to take the library surveillance measure out of the revision of the Patriot Act. Senate and White House action is pending and their positions are uncertain.

Does anyone really think that terrorists against the United States will plot their next attack from books in a public library? The chance of that is far too small to justify turning our libraries into spying grounds. Get rid of this absurd measure now.