Stacks, Statutes, and Symbolism
A Privacy Lawyer’s Day at the Library of Congress
This past week, I found myself in Washington, D.C. for a privacy and security law conference. This was the kind of conference where acronyms like CCPA, GDPR, FTC, and CIPA fly as freely as opinions, and the stakes for safeguarding personal data grow higher with every passing year. After three days of panels, workshops, and highly informative presentations that had me madly typing notes to take back to my colleagues, I gave myself Saturday to do something equally meaningful but far less frenetic: I visited the Library of Congress.
As someone who’s spent her career straddling the lines between law, technology, and creative storytelling, the Library of Congress has always held a kind of mythic status for me. It’s a temple to both legal precedent, knowledge and education, and literary imagination. So I did what any self-respecting lawyer and published author with a reverence for archives would do: I applied for a reader identification card.
It took about fifteen minutes. There was a surprisingly long line on Saturday, or maybe not given the recent news of Carla Hayden’s removal as head of the Library. A quick photo, a few questions, and suddenly, I had the keys to one of the most extraordinary collections of human knowledge on the planet. I walked through the marble halls of the Jefferson Building, through its main reading room, into the tunnels below that connect it to the Madison Building, where the Law Library Reading Room is situated, and perused the crowded collapsable shelves of law treatises that were so reminiscent of my own law school library. I was able to find a small shelf of privacy treaties and even sat down to read Proskauer on Privacy’s section on biometrics.
And then came the irony.
While I, a private citizen with a reader card, was able to peacefully reviewing legal commentary on biometrics, the news reported that just the day after, the current administration’s political appointees, the acting assistant librarian and the acting register of copyrights and director of the Copyright Office (which sits under the Library of Congress) were denied access to the Copyright Office for not having the appropriate badges. Some reports stated that they had to be escorted from the Library of Congress, but in truth, they never gained entry to the Copyright Office or Library and left voluntarily. This may just be a bureaucratic detail, but the symbolism wasn’t lost on me.
Access to knowledge in America is not supposed to be about power, proximity, or position. It’s about principle. And nowhere is that principle more alive than in the Library of Congress. Here, anyone seeking knowledge and scholarship, not just judges, lawmakers, or diplomats, can sit down and read the very laws that govern us. It’s a powerful reminder that information in a democracy is a public trust, not a private asset.
As a privacy lawyer, I often help my clients wrestle with the tension between openness and protection, between the need to secure personal data and the equally vital need for institutional transparency. The Library of Congress holds both ideas in delicate, dignified balance. It safeguards what must be preserved while making it radically accessible to anyone willing to learn (or even to stand in line for fifteen minutes).
I left that day with more than just research notes on biometrics. I left with a renewed sense of awe for what we are capable of when we do good, that in an era when truth can be obscured and institutions politicized, we must double down on the places that still stand for shared knowledge, civic literacy, and yes, even irony.
Because sometimes, the people trying to limit access to truth are shown the door, while the rest of us are shown to our seats in the reading room.
Source for the facts regarding administration appointees: The Guardian