GARDEN VARIETY PARANOIA ? LAPL LIBRARY RECORD NOT PRIVATE?
ACCIDENTALLY RUNNING INTO PORN?
ACCIDENTALLY RUNNING INTO PORN?
By Christine Trzyna C 2013
One of my more garden-variety-paranoid associates, who used to be a security guard at a world famous museum and owns a gun collection that was handed down in his family, is, among other things, afraid of how law enforcement (maybe the FBI?) can get your LIBRARY RECORD. The way this goes is that you're suspected of doing something wrong and so they get your library account number and then a list of all the books you ever took out from say, LAPL. From this they determine a psychological profile of you.
The truth is that I do suspect that LAPL and other libraries are collecting this information, but I don't know for sure. I feel more sure that they know exactly what you're doing on the computer with your two free hours, but then I still believe you'd have to be doing something illegal for any law enforcement to actually ask for the record.
Example, several years ago a person was arrested in the Studio City branch for using e-mail to send prostitutes to assignments. It was in the paper that the police had been monitoring (reading) his e-mails for years, since he'd been doing so from the Sherman Oaks branch.
I tried to calm my garden-variety-paranoid associate.
"I read all around subjects. I sometimes take out a book for the hell of it and I may or may not read the whole thing. There are books and films I've ordered, picked up, and then returned without reading or watching much of. NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU READ A BOOK OR WATCHED A FILM SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU TOOK IT HOME. NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU AGREE WITH AN AUTHOR'S POINT OF VIEW or that you were influenced by what you were exposed to! ou can just as well get pissed off at an author as you can suck up information. Who can prove that what you read or watch says anything about you besides that you were curious or had a whim?
Actually, to me, it's circumstantial evidence that you actually looked at or read a web-site. Unless you're Robert Blake and the FBI just looked at your hard drive and found out you were looking for murder supplies.
Through the years I have honestly and accidentaly hit into porn when I wasn't looking for it. n my lifetime I have actually looked for it almost never. I'm not for it. It goes against my spiritual beliefs and what I want for this world.
One such case was maybe a decade ago when I was looking for information on Sarasvati, the Goddess of the Arts in Hinduism. (You might think of her as a patron saint of writers, musicians, dancers...)
At the time I had an earthlink account and used their search engine. One of the main links on the first page was called "Sarasvati's Temple." So I clicked and got onto an inter-racial dating site. I believe it was owned by a woman of some Asian background and her purpose was to give dating advice to men, mostly Asian men, and to assure them that there were inaccurate stereotypes that were effecting their self esteem. So if you paged all the way down to say, page 20, you got to the International Penis Size Survey. This page had a 'how to measure' that had an actual penis on it. I wasn't offended. One of my platonic men friends thought it was so funny that he asked me to print the whole thing out for him to show his friends.
However, soon after that my earthlink account was plagued with porn spam, even communications that suggested I could get my hands on child pornography. It was disgusting. I was advised that pornographers were targeting me. I got over 700 such offers in the 3 weeks that I was out of town on vacation. One person suggested that the offer for child porn was actually an undercover operation.
Then there was the time I was checking on where hits were coming from to this Blog. I happened to be at a Latter Day Saints genealogy library taking a quick break from research and believe me when I say that in the one second that it took to see a flash of the porn and shut it down, the Church people were notified that someone was looking at porn. It was embarrassing as the manager came out and looked at what a row of young missionary men ("Elders") who had just come in were looking at on the computers.
More recently I discovered a graphic lesbian porn site linking to this blog. It took me about half a second to get back to a civilized view of the world. Sometimes people actually think that they are going to get at you in some way, say because you hate porn, by trying to infiltrate your work.
Is this where I yawn?
C 2013 - 2022 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved
