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 surpris…