A Pakistani man charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists claims that the FBI obtained evidence against him illegally when an agent went into the Chestatee Regional Library in Dawsonville, Georgia, to record his activities at a library computer on March 21, 2006, two days before his arrest. Jack Martin, an attorney for Syed Haris Ahmed, an engineering student at Georgia Institute of Technology at the time, filed a motion in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia alleging that an FBI agent followed his client into the library and viewed the browser history function to find out what websites and e-mail addresses he had been accessing, according to an October 11 Associated Press report. “The actions of the government agent,” the motion read, “contrary to the policies and procedures of the library, including policies to ensure the privacy of its authorized library users, violated the defendant’s reasonable expectations of privacy.”
“We have no record of the FBI being here,” Library Director Claudia Gibson told American Libraries, “although we did get a call later from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation asking about our policies.” She added, “The agent would not have been able to go to a browser history on one of our computers, because that is erased after a patron logs off as a privacy protection measure. But if the man got up and left without logging off, the agent might have found his web history or even e-mail records.”
Both Gibson and then-director Lyn Hopper were attending the Public Library Association National Conference in Boston at the time.
U.S. Attorney David Nahmias told the AP that “public libraries are not safe havens for terrorist-related activity,” adding, “The FBI’s actions were lawful and appropriate as we will demonstrate when we respond to the motion in court.” Ahmed and his codefendant Ehsanul Islam Sadequee are accused of aiding a Canadian terrorist group by making videotapes of the U.S. Capitol building and other potential targets.